LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 





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CITIES OF OUR FAITH 



AND OTHER DISCOURSES AND ADDRESSES 



BY 



Rev. SAMUEL LUNT CALDWELL, d.d., ll.d. 



WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF 
DE.^ALDWELL 






OAKMAN S.' STEARNS, d.d. 



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BOSTON AND NEW TOEK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1890 



THB LIBRARY 
OF CONORSSt 

V^*SHINOTOII 



r 






Copyright, 1890, 
By STEPHEN A. CALDWELL. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass.,V. S. A. 
Printed by 11. 0. Houghton & Company. 



^0 

LL 

^ PREFACE. 

X — 

The " Cities of oui^ Faith " are four of seven papers 
which Dr. Caldwell was preparing for publication at the 
time of his death. In addition to those now published 
there were to be one on Geneva and one on Canterbury, 
the series to be prefaced by a chapter on " The City of 
God." His design was to weave around the chief cen- 
tres in the history of the Church the specific doctrines 
of which they were the representatives. His sons and 
his brother, Stephen A. Caldwell, of Philadelphia, Pa., 
desiring to preserve in permanent form those already 
completed, have requested me to add to them a selection 
from such of his other Historical Papers, his Addresses 
and Sermons, as would fairly represent him as a writer, 
teacher, and preacher. Some of them have already ap- 
peared in print, the others are taken from his manuscripts. 
I have carefully avoided any notes or comments of my 
own. May the book revive pleasant memories in the 
minds of the many friends whose friendship he esteemed 
and whom he delighted to serve. 

O. S. STEARNS. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Biographical Sketch 3 



CITIES OF OUR EAITH. 

I. Jerusalem 25 

11. Alexandria 51 

III. Rome 76 

IV. Constant ixoPLE .103 

HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

Saint Ambrose and his Time 129 

Benedict and the Benedictines 152 

The Mendicant Orders 180 

Roger Williams as an Author 212 

THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

I. Theology AND Education 245 

II. Theology and Literature 271 

ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

Literature in Account with Life 305 

Christianity and the Body 328 

The Supremacy of Love 336 

The Heavenly Vision 350 

The Missionary Resources of the Kingdom of Christ . 362 

CiESAR's Household 387 

The Parting Benediction 397 

The Overflowing Cup 409 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



BY 



OAKMAN S. STEARNS, D. D. 



BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCH. 



" The memoi'y of the just is blessed." Memory, how- 
ever, at its best, gives us only fragments of a whole. Life 
is a growth : '^ First the blade, then the ear, then the full 
corn in the ear." We watch the result, we see little of 
the process. Whatever we see of the process are the 
transitions from one stao:e of o^rowth to another. The 
whole life of one who has finished his earthly life never 
comes at our bidding. We see flashes of it, single inci- 
dents, scenes, thoughts, words, acts, but they are merely 
flashes. We make a note of them and they are gone. 

The writer knows his own limitations. His is not the 
deft hand of his friend, so matchless to portray character 
and life in their due proportions and real beauty, but he 
feels assured that there are friendly eyes which will over- 
look his deficiencies, and that " there are friendly hearts 
which love even the footprints of the vanished excellence." 
The simple, plain story of Dr. Caldwell's life may shed 
some light upon such of his writings as are printed in 
this volume. 

Samuel Lunt Caldwell was born November 13, 
1820, in the historic town of Newburyport, Mass. He 
was the first-born of nine children of Stephen and Mary 
(Lunt) Caldwell, the father a descendant of the Ipswich 
family of Caldwells, traditionally of Scotch origin ; the 
mother a descendant of Henry Lunt, who settled in New- 
bury as early as 1635. On both sides his ancestry was dis- 
tinguished by eminent men among the colonists, as yeomen, 
physicians, lawyers, and clergymen. They were Puritan 
in stock and Puritan in spirit. His father was a man of 



4 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

sterling integrity, and late in life, avowing himself a Chris- 
tian, became a prominent member of the Baptist Church. 
His mother from early life had consecrated herself to the 
service of Christ, and was intensely interested in religious 
work among the Indians. Hoping that her first-born son 
might be a chosen vessel for such service, like Hannah 
she consecrated young Samuel " unto the Lord all the 
days of his life." The boy knew nothing of this, but the 
tendencies of his youth were all in the line of study and 
thought. He loved a book more than the sports of the 
playground. He had no genius for trade or the mechanic 
arts. He was accordingly sent to the grammar school to 
be fitted for college. Two of his teachers were the well- 
known poets, George Lunt, a kinsman, and Albert Pike. 
Whether or not these poets stimulated his poetic temper- 
ament (for his life was a hymn, singing its melody through 
more than sixty years), is not known, but from the boy's 
letters after he entered college it is evident that they, or 
others of his teachers, ca,used him much sorrow and labor 
because of the meagreness of his preparation. He was 
admitted, however, into Waterville College (now Colby 
University) in 1835, and graduated with the class of 
1839. The college was straitened financially, and in- 
adequately equipped, but its teachers were men of large 
scholarship, enthusiastic, thorough disciplinarians, doing 
all in their power to train the mind to train itself, and 
inspiring to larger acquisitions by the truest methods. 
Young Caldwell was not yet fifteen years old. He was 
the youngest of a large class, and soon became the pet of 
the class. He had then, as ever afterwards, his choice 
friends with whom he took sweet counsel, but though se- 
lect he was never exclusive. His classmates were nearly 
all mature men, with convictions already formed, and he 
was their David. He kept pace with them, and the early 
lover of books, with his omnivorous reading of a larger 
range of books, before he had reached his junior year, 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 5 

was recognized as the best-read man of his class in Eng- 
lish Literature, and equally their superior in the use of 
such literature. One of his classmates writes : " Until 
his sophomore year he gave no sign of the career that 
awaited him. Before that stage in the curriculum, origi- 
nal compositions in English had not been required. The 
first one from his pen was a surprise, even to a doubt as 
to its paternity. But this doubt was soon dispelled. In 
no long time the class of '39 knew that it had in it one 
brilliant writer." The historical element in his mental 
furniture also began to show itself. The same classmate 
says : " Boy as he was, he had what afterward became so 
conspicuous, — a wonderful knowledge of eminent men, 
their names, their nationality, the age to which they be- 
longed, and the part they severally played in the drama of 
the world's history, whether with the pen, the tongue, or 
the sword." His standing in other branches of study was 
good, but " he revelled in literature, and in literature of a 
high order. From impure writings, no matter how gifted 
their authors, he instinctively recoiled." 

It is certainly suggestive of his future that at the 
Senior Exhibition of his class he chose for his subject 
" Classical Reminiscences," and that he was selected as 
the last speaker, as indicative of his rank, at least as a 
writer. Writing of the event to his parents he says : 
" It was my first public effort. We had a full house, and, 
what is more wonderful, I was not intimidated in the 
least." 

Among his classmates at the time of his graduation 
were Joseph Ricker, D. D., late State Agent of the Maine 
Baptist State Convention; Andrew H. Briggs, Esq., of 
Boston ; Abraham H. Granger, D. D., of Rhode Island ; 
and many others who have honored the school, the press, 
and the pulpit. Among his intimate friends of other 
classes were such men as M. B. Anderson, LL. D., ex- 
president of Rochester University, and the late Elias L. 



6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

Magoon, D. D. The catalogues of his day show that he 
was the literary companion of the choicest scholars in 
the college. 

During his sophomore year, or perhaps a little later, 
under the teaching and preaching of President Pattison, 
his " inmost life was unlocked " to him, his " spiritual 
difficulties were removed," and he found in Christ the new 
creation. His plans were now changed, but the sphere in 
which they should move was undecided. Whether or not 
the strong desire of his mother, who died April 17, 1835, 
that his life should be devoted to the Christian ministry, 
was to be gratified, was uncertain. He was very young. 
His piety had all the flux and efflux of youth. He shrank 
from the responsibilities of the ministry. A literary life 
was far more congenial to his tastes and to his prospects 
of success. And so, being not nineteen years of age at 
his graduation, to test his motives he accepted an appoint- 
ment to become principal of the Academy in Hampton 
Palls, N. H., continuing there until May, 1840, when he 
became principal of the West Grammar School of his 
native town. Here he remained, pondering his life-work 
and still shrinking from the ministry, until he finally de- 
cided to enter the Newton Theological Institution, to 
graduate with the class of '45. 

His class was an unusually able and brilliant one. They 
were stimulated by the minute and thorough teaching of 
Professor Hackett in New Testament exegesis, by the 
broad, comprehensive, epigrammatic, and incisive instruc- 
tion of Professor Sears in theology, and by the kind yet 
firm guidance of Professor Pipley in homiletics. The 
bees in the hive, though few in number, were busy and 
buzzing. The air was full of philosophical speculation. 
Emerson was at the height of his fame. Theodore Parker 
was beginning his work in Bo^on. Transcendentalism 
nestled at Brook Farm, a few miles distant. Coleridge's 
"Aids to Keflection" was the student's vade mecum. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 7 

Straussianism was winning followers on American soil. 
The young students plied their teachers with questions 
which would not be settled by a dogmatic aphorism. The 
debates in the class-room often prolonged the assigned 
hour into two hours, and the debates among classmates 
often extended into the midnight hour. Young Caldwell 
felt the magnetism of his surroundings, and with his char- 
acteristic self-mistrust and his life-long determination to 
hear both sides and all sides, became doubtful as to the 
genuineness of his call to the ministry. He walked in 
doubt many months, — as what true man has not? — always 
attending upon the regular prayer-meeting and upon the 
weekly class prayer - meeting. Says a classmate : " I do 
not remember that ever, in a single instance, he gave an 
exhortation to his fellow-students ; but his prayers had 
the same characteristics which made his public prayers in 
after years so edifying to spiritually-minded Christians." 
Finally his prayers were answered ; the doubts scattered, 
and he could say, " I see my way through." Newton was 
the seed-bed of his public life, and the seed produced good 
fruit. 

Marked among his classmates were Heman Lincoln, 
D. D., late Professor of Church History in the Newton 
Theological Institution ; Ebenezer Dodge, LL. D., late 
president of Madison University ; and Kendall Brooks, 
D. D., ex-president of Kalamazoo College. Others of his 
class became no less eminent as preachers and pastors. 

Soon after leaving the seminary he was invited to be- 
come pastor of a Baptist Church in St. Louis, Mo., but 
declined the call because he believed himself unfitted for 
a Western pastorate. He went South rather than West, 
and supplied the pulpit of the Baptist Church in Alexan- 
dria, Vsi., until May, 1846, when he accepted the call of 
the First Baptist Church in Bangor, Me., and was or- 
dained as its pastor the August following. Professor Bar- 
nas Sears, LL. D., preaching the sermon. 



8 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

The month following his ordination, September 17, 
1846, he married Mary Lenord Richards, the grand- 
daughter of Josiah Smith, M. D., of Newburyport, Mass., 
with whom she had lived from childhood, her parents 
having died when she was very young. She was a woman 
well educated, of excellent judgment, genial and attract- 
ive, amply qualified to enjoy the honors and grace the 
circles in which she was to move. The union was a pecu- 
liarly happy one, continuing nearly forty-three years. It 
was broken only for a few months, she following him to 
their final home January 18, 1890. 

Their children were, William Emery, now of New York 
city ; Samuel Lenord, M. D., of Providence, K. I. ; Mary 
Caroline and Alexander Humphrey, who died in infancy ; 
and Alice, who died in early childhood. 

Dr. Caldwell's work in Bangor was very congenial to 
him. He felt his youth and his lack of experience. He 
often referred to his inability to do hand-to-hand work in 
winning souls to Christ. He could not be an evangelist 
in the modern sense of that term. He often lamented 
the fact that his courage in doing pastoral work was not 
equal to the promptings of his heart. The duties of his 
parish were numerous and severe, yet he did what he 
could ; he put his soul into them, and during his ministry, 
under the cooperation of loyal brethren, a chapel was 
built, the meeting-house was enlarged and renovated, and 
even at that early day the envelope system for missionary 
contributions was adopted and put into successful opera- 
tion. "All the relations," says one of his co-workers, "of 
pastor and people, were very harmonious. He was a man 
of great courtesy, and it is not remembered that he was 
ever known to manifest a spirit of resentment towards 
any one, or to utter a harsh or censorious remark." His 
associations with the neighboring pastors of the city were 
specially helpful to him. The friendship of Rev. George 
W. Field, D. D., of the Central Church, Rev. John Cot- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 9 

ton Smith of the Episcopal Church, and Rev. George B. 
Little of the First Congregational Church, was a friend- 
ship of lifelong love. They lived together like brothers. 
But not merely as a pastor and a man was he beloved ; 
the pulpit was his throne, and from his pulpit he built up 
his church into the ways and works of the God he served. 
He fed them with the finest of the wheat. They knew it 
and loved him for it. Emphatically he dwelt among his 
own people. They were the people of his first choice, 
and neither ever forgot the other. There lies before me 
a sermon he preached to them in commemoration of the 
fortieth anniversary of his ordination. It glows with the 
revival of his early affection, and is a warm-hearted ex- 
pansion of his favorite theme, " The power and perma- 
nency of the kingdom of Christ." 

His influence extended beyond the city of his habita- 
tion. The churches of his own faith, and of other faiths 
in the State, called for his services on public occasions. 
His Alma Mater invited him to one of her chairs of in- 
struction, but he declined the honor. She selected him 
as one of her trustees, an office he gratefully accepted, and 
whose demands he faithfully met for thirteen years. In 
1858 she conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of 
Divinity. 

His name in Maine had given him fame. A pulpit 
was vacant, in many respects the most responsible and 
the most exacting in the gift of the Baptist denomination. 
To follow in the succession of pastors such men as Gano, 
Pattison, Hague, and Wayland, and succeed ; to keep 
Brown University and the ancient First Baptist Church 
of Providence, K. I., en rapport^ so that the needs of a 
congregation of such varying culture should be understood 
and satisfied, required a man of rare gifts ; one who could 
inspire their faith in him as the man, and one who had 
faith in himself and his God. The faith was mutual, 
and the church gave to the adopted son of Maine her 



10 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

hand and heart, while he with heart and hand made good 
proof of his ministry among them more than fifteen years. 
He was called in June, 1858, and remained until Septem- 
ber, 1873. 

After his death a memorial service was held in the ves- 
try of the First Baptist Church, and tender reminiscences 
were given by those who were well acquainted with his 
labors in Providence. Extracts from what was then said 
will be of more value to the reader than any generalities 
of mine. It must be borne in mind that Dr. Caldwell 
spent the last five years of his life in Providence. It 
should also be remembered that, so strong was his attach- 
ment to the church, he had kept his membership in her 
unbroken from the time he became her pastor. At the 
meeting referred to, the church voted to put upon her rec- 
ords a minute prepared by Kev. John Stockbridge, D. D., 
in which are found these words : '' We remember with ten- 
der interest the affection he bore to his people, his enter- 
ing so cordially into their joys, and his deep sympathy 
with them in their sorrows, the rare grace and fitness with 
which he conducted the solemn services of the house of 
mourning, and the anxious solicitude for the spiritual 
welfare of the flock of which the Holy Ghost had made 
him an overseer. . . . The memory of his many virtues 
will long live with us. We thank God for the pastorate 
which extended over so many years." Professor John L. 
Lincoln, LL. D., sent a choice letter, from which we quote 
these brief extracts : " How we love to think of his gen- • 
tleness and courtesy of spirit, his modesty and candor, his 
true humility, his freedom from resentment, and that ex- 
cellent charity in him which thinketh no evil and which 
beareth all things. ... Of his vaiious services, when he 
was our pastor, I remember especially his discourses on the 
life and teaching of our Lord, as drawn from the Gospel 
of John. They were rich and discriminating exhibitions 
of truth, and also very vivid, well-nigh pictorial unfold- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 11 

ings of scenes in the Saviour's life. I. remember, too, 
with gratitude, Dr. Caldwell's Wednesday evening lectures, 
and his lectures preparatory to the communion, as most 
elevating and helpful in their direct bearing upon every- 
day Christian living. . . . What a cause we have for pro- 
found gratitude that he was spared to deliver his dis- 
course at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our 
church ! It was a service of inestimable value and ex- 
cellence, and as a last one what a fitting close to his long 
and useful life ! " ^ President E. B. Andrews, LL. D., 
said " that when he was in college it was a common opin- 
ion among the students that Dr. Caldwell, while an able 
preacher, was not an approachable man. . . . When a 
pupil of Dr. Caldwell, in the theological seminary," he 
said, " I found him most approachable and a very warm 
friend. He had shown a consideration and attention 
which, looking back now, were beyond price." Professor 
Albert Harkness, LL. D., said : " We have received from 
him [Dr. Caldwell] memories which can never be lost. 
Our pastor preached to us a gospel full of possibilities 
and love. There was nothing gloomy and forbidding in 
the gospel he set before us. It was pure and Christ-like. 
. . . But his usefulness was not by any means confined 
to his pulpit utterances. His life preached the more 
powerfully. Dr. Caldwell was by nature a peacemaker. 
He promoted friendly relations between the church and 
Brown University. He accordingly labored and prayed 
for both. He was a true, devoted scholar, a living exam- 
ple of pure, cultivated Christianity." Such are a few of 
the testimonies from those who knew Dr. Caldwell and 
his work in Providence. Few pastors are remembered 
with an affection so true and unchanging as he. 

His pastorate was a busy one. It taxed his strength ; 
yet he found time to meet other demands besides those of 

^ Two Hundred and Fifty Years : Historical Discourse, Samuel L. 
Caldwell, D. D. 



12 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

his church. The city of Providence was the pride of his 
heart. In every moral and philanthropic endeavor to pro- 
mote her best interests, he listened to and obeyed her call.^ 
With Christian denominations of every name he was in 
active sympathy and ready to cooperate. Even the press 
laid its claims upon him. A scrap-book in my possession 
contains contributions to the " Providence Journal," on 
almost every conceivable topic, — witty, grave, and se- 
vere, — sufficient to form a large volume. He edited a 
memoir of Professor E. P. Dunn, D. D., and was co- 
editor of the " Service of Song." His relations to the 
University were peculiarly friendly and loyal. And she 
honored him in return by conferring upon him the degree 
of Doctor of Laws, by electing him one of her trustees, 
three years afterwards a member of the Board of Fellows, 
and by choosing him as secretary of the Corporation of 
Brown University, an office he held until his death, a 
period of fifteen years. 

His life as a pastor closed in September, 1873, when he 
became Professor of Church History in the Newton Theo- 
logical Institution. He was well equipped for the position. 
His studies had been largely in the lines of civil and ec- 
clesiastical history, and during his pastorate of the church 
which Roger Williams founded. Baptist history had be- 
come the subject of careful investigation. His many an- 
niversary sermons pertaining to the history of the Baptist 
churches of Rhode Island, and volumes three and four 
of the " Publications of the Narragansett Club," of which 
he was editor, show his skill in careful research and trust- 
worthy results. 

But to pass from the sphere of a pastor to that of a 
professional teacher is a severe test of one's capabilities. 
Knowledge is one thing, to impart knowledge effectively 
is another thing. The critical eye of a congregation of 

^ He was, by the appointment of the governor, inspector of the 
Rhode Island State Prison seven years. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 13 

dissimilar attainments is not the critical eye of a class of 
students of substantially similar attainments, each on the 
alert to find some flaw in the statements of his teacher. 
Yet tradition affirms that in the class-room Professor 
Caldwell was never found nodding or tripping. His facts 
were found to be facts, and he classified them to a date 
when the occasion required it. The range of his learning 
and the lucidity with which in unadorned yet elegant 
English he unfolded his topics, made his example of as 
much worth to the student in regard to the right method 
of studying and reaching conclusions as the knowledge he 
himself imparted. He may not have been as social with 
his class as some teachers, he did not fawn over them nor 
flatter them, but he was always accessible to those who 
desired his aid, and always ready to give them his time 
and strength for the removal of their difficulties. The 
testimony of President Andrews, already quoted, is ample 
evidence of this fact, and the written testimony of others 
now under my eye is of the same character. A colleague 
knows little of another's class-room work, but he knows 
better than any student of his colleague's aim, ambition, 
sympathy, and love for those under his charge. And my 
memory is not errant when I say that during an experi- 
ence of more than twenty years, in which I have been 
associated with the professors at Newton, no one of them 
has ever expressed himself more kindly concerning his 
classes, shown more joy in their acquisitions, or indicated 
a more personal interest in their prospects for the future. 
Besides history, a large part of Professor Caldwell's 
teaching at Newton was in the department of homiletics. 
Here, of course, he was at home. He had preached more 
than twenty -eight years, and knew the demands of the 
pulpit. He knew its failures and its triumphs. He knew 
the masters of pulpit eloquence and the secret of their 
victories, while his own experience had taught him the 
secret of many a failure. His idea of a sermon may be 



14 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

seen by a glance at those contained in this volume, but he 
never felt that he had attained to his ideal, The centre 
of his conception of a sermon may be found in his oft- 
repeated dicta to his classes : " Have a 'planr " Be sure 
to have a plan.^^ " With or without a manuscript^ have a 
plan.'''' " A sermon is a growth, a growth from a text, a 
living organism ; let it assume in every part an organic 
shape." " Make your transitions so clear and emphatic 
that you will have no need of ' hooks and eyes.' " " Let 
the form be so vitalized that it shall necessarily be clothed 
with living flesh, and your hearers see nothing and feel 
nothing except the expanded and well -clothed thought 
you intend to give them." " Do not deal in episodes, nor 
fill blanks with vacant, vagrant thoughts, but move on 
with your application as you go, until the whole is felt to 
palpitate with life." " Enlarge your vocabulary by broad 
reading, and secure thereby facility of expression and 
variety of expression." " Study dictionaries, read dic- 
tionaries " (a habit of his own) "for effectiveness of 
style." Such, I am told, were some of his aphoristic 
teachings. It was a high ideal, and to present ideals was 
the work assigned to him. But he knew its limitations. 
Says one of his students, a warm friend and an apprecia- 
tive scholar : " Notwithstanding his own exquisite taste 
in the choice of words, and his crisp, chaste, and elegant 
literary style, he most wisely laid emphasis on substance 
of thought rather than on graceful expression. The ' hete 
noir ' to him was off-hand, superficial thought. It was in 
fear of this that he was so cautious in recommending the 
preaching of unwritten sermons, although he said that 
' the extemporaneous method is ideally best.' " 

For his personal example, his attainments, his rever- 
ence for truth, his urbanity of manner, and his ardent 
zeal for a ministry of power, his classes will cherish his 
five years of instruction in Newton among their choicest 
gifts. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 15 

The historical papers contained in this volume, and 
others on kindred themes, such as " Subterranean Rome " 
and " Comparative Religion," were the product of his 
pen during his professorship in Newton. 

On the 14th of August, 1873, John Howard Raymond, 
LL. D., the first president of Vassar College, a man dis- 
tinguished for his skill in organizing this "first great col- 
lege for women," worn out with incessant labor, surren- 
dered his toils and entered into his reward. The trustees 
selected Professor Caldwell as his successor. He accepted 
the position, and entered upon its duties in September of 
the same year. For him it was an untried field. On 
him rested the government of the college, instruction in 
mental and moral philosophy, and the pastoral care of the 
college. The position was an honorable one, and a re- 
sponsible and exacting one. The college had grown in 
numbers and in popularity beyond all expectations. It 
had had the world for its source of supply of students. 
It had had no rival. It was well funded by its founder, 
and when President Caldwell began his work it needed 
and desired no financial agent, nor did it expect from 
him the duties of a soliciting agent. He was to be the 
educating head of the college, and his success was to 
depend upon his power to keep the standard of scholar- 
ship high, to keep the moral and religious tone of the 
college pure, and to be as far as possible the student's 
temporary pastor and friend. But the number of stur 
dents could not be expected to be as large as formerly. 
There were now rivals, notably Wellesley and Smith. 
The smaller colleges were inviting young women to their 
privileges, and during his presidency Harvard had ar- 
ranged an annex. Yet Yassar prospered in respect to 
numbers under his administration. She generally had all 
the students she could accommodate, and a larger number 
than formerly applied for admission in the year he re- 
signed, though totally ignorant of such a purpose on his 
part. 



16 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

I recall two brief visits made to Vassar while he was 
president, and I find through others that my impressions 
are correct. He was full of zeal in teaching his own classes, 
and careful to know the instruction given to the other 
classes. His relations with both scholars and teachers 
were pleasant and inspiring. His religious life withal 
was the tender regard of a pastor. He sought for the 
Christian spirit as the ruling agency in the highest intel- 
lectual acquisitions. I remember that one of my visits 
occurred during the Lenten season, and that the Episco- 
palian students, as expressive of their love for and con- 
fidence in him, requested him to conduct services for them. 
He gladly assented, and at the service which I attended, 
had I not known that the president was a Baptist, I 
should have supposed him a clergyman of their own faith. 
From all I then saw and have since heard, I believe that 
as an educator he never did better work ; as a president he 
was clear in his judgments and wise in his methods, and 
as the pastor he kept the tone of the college pure and 
elevating. 

Yv^hen he accepted the presidency he limited, in his 
own mind, his term of service to five years. He remained 
seven. There w^ere some complaints as to the number of 
the students and the income of the college. It was not in 
him to beat the bush for birds, or to rake the streets for 
money. Accordingly, June 7, 1885, he resigned, the 
trustees adopting the following resolutions : — 

1. Resolved, That the resignation of President Caldwell, to 
take effect at the close of the present academic year, be and is 
hereby accepted, with the expression of the deep regret of the 
Board that circumstances have seemed to Dr. Caldwell to ren- 
der it his duty thus to sever his connection with the college. 

2. Resolved, That we hereby express to the retiring presi- 
dent our profound sense of the patience and faithfulness with 
which he has discharged during the past seven years the duties 
of his office, our personal affection and esteem for his charac- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 17 

ter, and our warmest wishes for his future happiness and suc- 
cess. 

3. Resolved, That in consideration of the importance to the 
college, during the few ensuing weeks, of an executive head 
acquainted with matters relative to instructors and students, we 
request Dr. Caldwell to perform the functions of president 
until a successor shall be appointed. 

Retiring from Yassar, he decided to spend the re- 
mainder of his days in literary work, and he naturally 
turned his feet towards his former home in Providence. 
The memories of the place were fragrant to him. He 
loved the First Church, and he knew he was loved by her. 
The friends in the church and in the University who had 
" fallen on sleep " made the spot sacred to him ; and those 
surviving, to whom he had ministered, and with whom he 
had lovingly associated, made the spot congenial to him. 
His life here was quiet yet busy. His interest in liter- 
ature, education, and religion continued unabated. He 
identified himself, as formerly, with the Providence Athe- 
naeum, and was president of the Corporation at the time 
of his death. He was an active co-worker of the Rhode 
Island Historical Society. Whatever would promote the 
interests of the University received his attention and care. 
He planned and completed the first four of seven papers 
on " The Cities of our Faith." He was called to address< 
the societies of several colleges at their anniversaries, 
and preached, as he often said, " whenever I can get a 
chance." That chance came quite frequently, and never 
more heartily than when the pulpit of the First Church 
needed a supply. Of his relations to his pastor, the Rev. 
T. Edwin Brown, D. D., said, at the memorial meeting 
referred to : "A great affliction has fallen upon me. I 
bear glad testimony to the beauty and tenderness of rela- 
tion which has existed between the pastor and ex-pastor 
for the five years since Dr. Caldwell returned to this city. 
He could not have been tenderer and more sympathetic. 
2 



18 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

In it the graciousuess and urbanity of the man were illus- 
trated, his gentleness and unselfishness. It might be weU 
said of him that grace was his characteristic quality, the 
grace in our Lord Jesus Christ." 

But the time of his departure came, — came suddenly, 
unexpectedly. He had been in the enjoyment of excel- 
lent health during the summer, and had preached with 
unusual power. On the Sunday previous to his last ill- 
ness it was noticed that he appeared remarkably vigorous. 
In his Bible-class on that day he was as bright and stimu- 
lating as ever. But on Monday, September 16th, while 
engaged in his last literary work, arranging his books 
upon their shelves, a task he was never willing to commit 
to another hand, he was smitten with a chill, from the 
results of which he never recovered. His wife nursed him 
as none but such a wife can. His younger son, a physi- 
cian, watched over him and ministered to him with filial 
fidelity; other skilled physicians counseled and advised. 
He rallied and relapsed repeatedly. His disease baffled 
human skill, the hour had struck, and on Thursday, Sep- 
tember 26, 1889, at 10.45 a. m., unconscious to those 
about him, he passed home, seemingly saying to them by 
the record of his life, " Let not your heart be troubled." 
" I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God 
and your God." 

The next Saturday, in the meeting-house where he had 
so frequently comforted others, and in the presence of 
those who had known him, admired him, and loved him, 
there were simple funeral services, such as he desired, 
conducted solely by his pastor, consisting of Scripture- 
reading, singing by the choir of " Abide with Me," " O 
Paradise," " Servant of God, well done," and prayer. 
Before the prayer Dr. Brown read the following telegram 
from Dr. Caldwell's intimate and faithful friend, Rev. 
George D. Boardman, D. D., of Philadelphia, Pa. : " In 
Dr. Caldwell's death the church of Christ has lost an 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 19 

eminent preacher, a sagacious counselor, a scholarly- 
champion, a Christian exemplar. My own sense of be- 
reavement is so keen that were the funeral any day but 
Satui-day I should certainly attend it." 

He was buried in the family lot in Newburyport, Mass., 
and by his side now lies the wife of his youth. 

Dr. Caldwell was a man whose very presence com- 
manded attention. Tall, well-proportioned, a large head, 
with a liquid, nervous, expressive eye, there was an air of 
elegance, refinement, and power about him, which would 
cause him to be selected in a crowd as a man endowed by 
nature as well as culture for the position of a leader. 
Yet he was simple-hearted as a child, and as free from 
the consciousness of superiority as the humblest citizen. 
There was neither royalty in his gait nor in his manner of 
address. An inborn self - distrust, self-depreciation, to- 
gether with an inborn inertia, held him back from assert- 
ing himself on public occasions, and from expressing his 
convictions with the boldness of personal authority in the 
pulpit and in the class-room. This instinctive shrinking 
from self-assertion is the key to his apparent reserve, 
which has often been attributed to haughtiness and cold- 
ness. Few men were ever less arrogant, less egotistic, 
less exclusive. From a child he had been a lover of 
books, his whole life had been substantially a literary life, 
and the man of similar tastes most naturally was attracted 
to him and became his intimate friend, but he repelled no 
one who desired his help and friendship. 

Dr. Caklwell's special mental characteristic was his in- 
tuitive perception of the essence of a subject. His read- 
ing was broad, more largely indeed in the spheres of liter- 
ature, philosophy, and theology than in that of the nat- 
ural sciences ; yet this broad reading was so completely 
under his control that the central thoughts, when he wished 
to apply them, came to him as suddenly and swiftly as a 
flash of light. His mind, when at rest, seemed to be inert 



20 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

or brooding ; when aroused, it had the flight of an eagle. 
Marvelous, and not fabulous, are the stories told of his 
written and oral efforts when quickened by an emergency 
— how a few hours produced the best sermons he ever 
preached ; how the noteworthy Jubilee sermon, more than 
half of it, was written the night before it was preached ; 
how, in committees, board meetings, and amid heated dis- 
cussions on public occasions, he would gather together the 
gravest of the difficulties and with a few words bring 
order out of confusion. 

Dr. Caldwell's power in the pulpit consisted largely in 
the spiritual nourishment with which he fed his people. 
His sermons were more ethical than doctrinal, more 
scriptural than polemical, more didactic than hortatory. 
His style was simple, clear, unadorned, abounding in 
short, pithy sentences, with a marvelous freshness of 
thought and progress of thought. There was no straining 
for effect, no startling surprises, no impassioned bursts of 
eloquence, but an even flow of his own thoughts into the 
minds of those who listened to him. There was beauty 
of style, often the very poetry of style, the sermon sing- 
ing like a hymn, to the sweetest melody, from the begin- 
ning to its close ; but it was the poetry of truth, and 
truth alone must be responsible for results. The text 
was explained, defended, and unfolded, the application 
keeping pace with the movement of the discourse, and, 
singularly for one so familiar with history, his illustrations 
were drawn from nature rather than from man. His man- 
ner was reverent, and, for one who usually preached from 
a manuscript, conversational. His voice was not melodi- 
ous, his delivery slow, and his intonations rather monoto- 
nous ; but when preaching to his own people, or to his 
students at Vassar, there was a tenderness of spirit and a 
subdued emotion which hid the manner in the urgency of 
the matter. He sought to build up the church of God in 
His own truth, and to win men to the truth by the power 
of God which was in His truth. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 21 

Of Dr. Caldwell's skill as a teacher I cannot speak 
from personal knowledge. I can see how he might fail to 
meet the needs of the average of a class. I find that 
some of his students praise him for what is deemed by- 
others a defect. Probably he assumed too much knowl- 
edge on the part of his pupils, and did not give sufficient 
attention to elementary instruction. His mind was full, 
tense with his subject, he saw it all vividly ; in history he 
was living over again the life of ages, and he stated re- 
sults rather than processes ; in the sermon he saw it as a 
whole, and was eager to show how to make wholes rather 
than dwell on minutiae ; but the testimony of all is that the 
reservoir was full, and the contents were to be had by him 
who would draw them. Always scholarly and accurate, 
always catholic in spirit as a searcher for truth wherever 
found, the tradition is that, when he was correcting an 
erroneous statement made by a student concerning one 
of the early antagonists to Christianity, another student 
said to him, " Professor Caldwell, do you think there ever 
were any heretics ? " The reply has not been preserved, 
but it is doubtless true that the professor believed that 
error found its wings in the truth which they covered. 
Strong and firm, and ready to contend for "the faith 
once delivered to the saints," loyal to his own denomina- 
tion from first to last, he could give credit to all faiths 
which contained more or less of the true faith. He be- 
lieved that " the firm foundation of God standeth, having 
this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are His." 

Space does not allow me to mention other features in 
the character of Dr. Caldwell. His friends will easily 
recall them, — his social qualities, winning by the pure 
tone of his thought hosts of friends ; his love of home, 
making its atmosphere an atmosphere of love ; his calm- 
ness in times of excitement, arousing hope where there 
was despair ; his unwillingness to contend though he were 
the sufferer, determined to bide his time ; his sensitiveness 



22 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

to reproach, yet unwilling to cherish evil towards those 
who would wrong him ; above all, his pervading spiritual- 
mindedness, which, with no assumed solemnity of manner, 
put him in touch with the soul needing sympathy in the 
hour of sorrow or of joy, in the class-room, the sanctuary, 
or on public occasions. Few are they who have not been 
moved and subdued by his prayers. Many a one has 
called him specially gifted in prayer. Not seldom has 
a man attended upon his preaching who cared little 
about that part of the services, for the sake of his prayers. 
And many have queried as to the secret of this power. 
It was not the reading of prayers, nor the studying of 
prayers, nor the writing of prayers ; it was the prayerful 
spirit which seemed to pervade him, and made it as natu- 
ral for him to pass suddenly into the immediate presence 
of God as to go into his favorite study. His outward 
appearance might not make such an impression, but the 
fact was, that a man so unwilling to talk about his per- 
sonal religious experience had formed the habit of com- 
muning with God and felt himself at home with God. 

No language so fittingly expresses my idea of him as a 
man and a Christian as that of Paul to the Corinthians : — 

" Love sufferetJi long and is kind ; love envieth not ; 
love vaunteth not itself^ is not pnffed up^ doth not hehave 
itself unseemly^ seeheth not its own^ is not provohed^ 
taketh not account of evil ; rejoiceth not in unrighteous- 
ness^ hut rejoiceth with the truth ; heareth all things^ he- 
lieveth all things^ hopeth all things^ endureth all things, 

1 Cor. xiii. 4-7. 



CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

They shall call thee, The city of the Lord." — Isaiah Ix. 14. 
One spirit, diverse ministries." — 1 Cor. xii. 4-6, 



CITIES OF OUR FAITH, 



I. JERUSALEM. 

Of the cities of onr religion we begin with Jerusalem, 
for there the relioion of Israel comes to its consummation 
and capital. And it was the religion of Israel which in 
time became the religion of Christ. The faith of Paul 
was only the faith of Abraham enlarged, the acorn become 
an oak. Christianity grew out of Judaism. It was not a 
rebellion, but an evolution. The earlier was germinal and 
prophetic of the later. Jesus was a son of David accord- 
ing to the flesh. His twelve apostles were Jews. His 
church began in Jerusalem. The New Testament has its 
roots in the Old. They are two volumes of the same book. 
Abraham rejoiced to see our Lord's day and was glad. 

It is a far cry from Abraham to David ; from Ur of tlie 
Chaldees to Jebus of the Canaanites, across a thousand 
years. The change from the fortress of the Jebusite to 
the Temple of Solomon, from the threshing-floor of Arau- 
nah to the Jerusalem of the Herods, still more from 
Jacob's stone in Bethel to the maonificent rituals of Cai- 
phas, still more the transition from the simple faith of the 
fathers of the Jewish race to that of Hillel and Gamaliel, 
from the first seed of Judaism to its perfected fruit, covers 
a grand era in the history of mankind. It is the growth 
of a nation as well as a religion, of a national religion, of 
a theocracy into a monarchy. 

It was a long time before Israel came to Jerusalem, and 
its religion found a capital. The progenitor of the He- 



26 CITIES OF OUB FAITH. 

brews dwelt in tents, though he looked for a city which 
hath foundations whose builder and maker is God. His 
successors were shepherds and nomads without a country. 
In Egypt they kept their Hebrew separateness, without 
becoming a nation, without losing themselves in the supe- 
rior and dominant race. Always in their hearts was the 
tradition of the old home of their fathers, and the hope of 
their return to it. And so whatever they absorbed from 
that ancient civilization they carried away as seed for the 
new future in which their nationality was shaping itself. 
They fled into the wilderness ; they spread over Canaan ; 
but they were still twelve tribes with separate interests, 
though with a certain community of religion. Their reli- 
gion, born in the desert, growing up under sacerdotal 
influences, had its sanctuaries here and there, and its mov- 
able home and tabernacle, but only that, and no fixed, cen- 
tralized seat till with David came monarchy and a metro- 
politan government, and Jerusalem, the city and temple 
of its religion for a thousand years to come. Here at last 
Israel gathered up its scattered life, its six centuries of 
preparatory history, all its elements of greatness, into a 
new period of power and splendor, and as well of division 
and ruin. Here began Jerusalem, small indeed among 
the great capitals, capital of a small nation, and yet, as 
Dean Milman says, "the scene of more extraordinary 
events, more strange and awful vicissitudes, than any city 
in the universe, not excepting Rome." ^ Here David set 
his throne, and gave a permanent capital to his country. 

For seven years and a half David had been king in the 
ancient city of Hebron,^ too far south for a strong hold 
upon the whole kingdom. He struck for a new capital, 
and instead of going to the old towns, like Bethel, or She- 
chem, or Samaria, he laid siege to the old fastness of Je- 
bus, on the boundary between Judah and Benjamin, and 
by a bold stroke took it from the Jebusites, who had held 

1 History of the Jews, i. 290. ^ 2 Sam. v. 5. 



JERUSALEM. 27 

it from the old days when the Canaanites ruled the land. 
It was a place hard to take, especially from the brave 
mountaineers who lost it at last from presumption rather 
than cowardice. They trusted to its natural strength, 
that even the blind and the lame could defend it against 
David. But he took it by assault on its steepest and most 
difficult side. For it was a bunch of hills, on the north 
running out into a plateau, but on the other sides falling 
off in deep, precipitous ravines with a descent of three or 
four hundred feet.^ 

The highest and southwesternmost of these hills was the 
one where the fortress stood, where David built his palace, 
where he and fourteen of his royal successors were buried, 
the Mount Sion which often gave name to Jerusalem itself. 
" Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion, and 
called it the City of David." ^ It was the city of David, 
not by capture only, but by the beginnings which he gave 
to its sacredness and its greatness. He had the foresight 
to fix his capital on a spot which it held as long as any 
government held, and which has lasted longer almost than 
any city in the world. Here was his government. Here 
was his court. Here he consolidated the nation. Here he 
laid great foundations, not for architectural splendor only, 
but for a kingdom and a church. Here his successors 
ruled for almost four hundred years. Here at last came 
Jesus, " of the house and lineage of David," and set up a 
new, divine kingdom which shall know no end. 

During the thirty-three years of David's reign the town 
had no great splendor. It grew, for the court was there ; 
it was the headquarters of the army, and of the ecclesi- 
astical establishment. There was friendship between the 
Tyrian king and David, and a house was built for him by 
architects brought from Tyre ; but it was of wood, as 
probably were the other houses which David made.^ The 
ark was kept in a tent, though not the old one, which had 
1 2 Sam. V. 7, 9. ^2 Sam. v. 7-9. ^ i Chron. xv. 1. 



28 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

been left in Gibeon, very likely worn ont, but a new one 
which David had set up. The ark, the wooden chest in 
which the tables of the Mosaic law were deposited, had 
been kept in different families here and there, until now 
David brings it out of its obscurity up to his new capital, 
and the occasion is made a great national festival. For 
more than four centuries the sanctuary of Israel had been 
movable. Now it is to have a permanent home. It is 
to be established in Mount Zion. This is David's first 
thought in its capture, " to find a place for the Lord, a 
habitation for the mighty God of Jacob." ^ " For the Lord 
hath chosen Zion, he hath desired it for his habitation. 
This is my resting-place forever. Here will I dwell, for I 
have desired it." It was a great event. It consecrated 
the city. It gave a new impulse to the religion of Israel. 
The priesthood was organized. And it started the concep- 
tion of a house instead of a tent, of a stately temple for 
Jehovah, the God of Israel, which came to its splendid 
consummation after David slept with his fathers and Sol- 
omon reigned in his stead. 

For Solomon was a great builder : David was a soldier. 
The thought was David's ; the execution was with his son.^ 
The father's hand had been too bloody to be put to such a 
sacred work. The son, as a result of his father's victo- 
ries, was to reign in prosperity and peace, and could spend 
what the father had collected. For David made great 
preparations to carry out the idea which had been growing 
in his mind in his later years.^ According to the chroni- 
cler he gathered millions of gold and silver, with bronze 
and iron, with marbles, costly woods, and precious stones 
in immense stores. On these Solomon set to work in the 
fourth year of his reign, and it was more than seven years 
before the Temple was completed. In silence its stones 
and beams were put together, no sound of axe or hammer 

1 Psa. cxxxii. 13, 14. ^ 1 Cliron. xxviii. 11, 12, 19. 

3 1 Chroii. xxii. 14 ; xxix. 2. 



JERUSALEM. 29 

being heard. " Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric 
sprung," is the poetic conception of Bishop Heber, It 
cost an immense amount. Indeed, its splendor was not so 
much in its architecture as in its costly material. It was 
not large. Though in its dimensions exactly double the 
size of the tabernacle, it had none of the colossal magni- 
tude, for instance, of the Egyptian temples, or the later 
Christian cathedrals, in one of which, it has been said, 
" the Jewish Temple would have been contained four times 
over." 1 In fact, it was simply an enlarged and more 
costly and durable tabernacle ; and like the Tabernacle, 
it was not built for a congregation and a multitude. Its 
Holy of Holies v/as visited but once a year, and then by 
the solitary High Priest. The Holy Place was open only 
to the officiating priests. Worship went on in the courts 
under the open sky, where stood the altar for sacrifice, and 
the tank and the lavers for ablution, all of molten brass. 
For four hundred and fifteen years it stood, though ten of 
the tribes forsook it as their sanctuary after the death of 
Solomon, to be followed by its successors a second and a 
third time, till eleven hundred years later it fell to rise no 
more. 

The Temple did not make all the magnificence of Jeru- 
salem, though it was its great sacred edifice and gave it 
importance and renown. There was the great palace of 
Solomon, with its throne of ivory. There were the walls 
and the aqueducts, and the towers and the palaces and the 
gardens. Under Solomon Jerusalem was new, and its first 
splendor was its greatest. And yet the beauty of Jerusa- 
lem was hardly magnificence. For it was small of neces- 
sity, and, as the pilgrim in the one hundred and twenty- 
second Psalm says, "a city that is compact together." 
The deep valleys on the three sides, the fortifications on 
the fourth, shut it up within a small compass, and com- 
pelled compactness. Says Canon Liddon : " Possibly this 
^ Stanley, Jewish Church, ii. 248. 



30 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. * 

pilgrim had seen Damascus, straggling out amid the beau- 
tiful oasis which surrounds it in the plain of the Abana ; 
or he had seen Memphis, a long string of buildings, thickly 
populated, extending for some twelve or fourteen miles 
along the west bank of the Nile. Compared with these 
Jerusalem had the compact beauty of a highland fortress, 
its buildings as seen from below standing out against the 
clear Syrian sky, and conveyiug an impression of grace 
and strength that would long linger in the memory." ^ It 
had no commercial splendor, no site on a navigable river, or 
by the sea. Isaiah rejoices in Jehovah '' as in the place of 
broad rivers and streams," while Jerusalem is " a quiet hab- 
itation," — "wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither 
shall gallant ship pass thereby." ^ It was secluded, away 
from the highways of the world, and insignificant in size 
or population, beside the great capitals of material civili- 
zation which have far less to do with the higher life, and 
the final destiny of the human race. And in this royal 
magnificence was the seed of future trouble, and destruc- 
tion at last. During the reigns of twenty kings Jerusalem 
went through all vicissitudes of prosperity and disaster. 
The vast treasures of the Temple were the temptation now 
of the Egyptian, and now of the Assyrian ; as the Temple 
itself was now defiled and now purged by the alternation 
of bad kings and good ones, till at last, some four centuries 
and a half after, and five hundred and eighty-six years 
before Christ, it fell before the arms of Nebuchadnezzar, 
who wiped it out as a man wipeth a dish. The walls fell, 
palaces and the Temple were burned, and the population 
itself was swept off into the land of the conqueror.^ It 
seemed as if it were the end of Jerusalem, and even of the 
Hebrew race. No king, no temple, no city, the old glory 
a pathetic memory, the old magnificence a ruin. It was 
the mournful elegy of Jeremiah : " How doth the city sit 

1 Sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral, Sunday, August 22, 1886. 

2 Isa. xxxiii. 20, 21. ^ Pga. Ixxiv. 79. 



JERUSALEM. 31 

solitary that was full of people ! How is she a widow ! 
she that was great among the nations, and princess among 
the provinces. From the daughter of Zion all her majesty 
is departed." ^ 

But out of the land of the waster restoration was to come. 
In the ashes of exile still lived their wonted fires. The 
bitter discipline of captivity could not extinguish the de- 
sire of the Jew for his old home, and it prepared him to 
go back to it with something better than he carried away. 
The Persian had taken the place of the Assyrian, and the 
great Cyrus was ready to encourage the aspirations of 
Daniel and Zerubbabel ; was, without being aware of it, 
to fulfill the confident expectation of Jeremiah and Ezekiel 
that their countrymen would come back, and Jerusalem be 
built again. With fifty thousand people, the grandson of 
Jehoiachin, the nineteenth king, was sent back as governor 
of Judea ; and seventy years after the destruction of the 
Temple it was rebuilt and dedicated, not indeed with the 
old stateliness and pomp, but with a faith and a zeal not 
unworthy of the ancient time. Seventy years later came 
Nehemiah from the court of Artaxerxes to rebuild the 
walls, as he expressed it, of " the city of his fathers' sep- 
ulchres." 2 There was a Jerusalem again, but it was no 
longer the city of David. There was no restoration of the 
royal line. There was a High Priest, but no King. There 
was an intense Judaism, a hatred for other races and reli- 
gions, the new-kindled hope of a Messiah even knitting 
closer the national pride. After Nehemiah, for more than 
two hundred years, — a period (as Dean Milman says) as 
long as from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the accession 
of Queen Victoria, — the Jews remain in historical silence 
and darkness. The Persian gave back Jerusalem to the 
Jews, and the Greek and the Roman became in their turn 
its conquerors and rulers. For a hundred and fifty years 
and more, Alexander and the Ptolemies, and then the 
1 Lam. i. 1, 6. 2 ;t^eh. ii. 5. 



32 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

Seleucids, were masters of Judea, till a race of native he- 
roes, the Maccabees, arose, recovered Jerusalem, rededi- 
cated the Temple, and founded the Asmonean dynasty. 
The rule of the Alexandrian kings was in the main pacific 
and beneficent. But with the kings of Antioch Judea was 
in sullen or overt antagonism, till at last provoked to in- 
surrection, and then the sword of the Maccabees won 
independence. 

For a hundred and thirty years their descendants ruled, 
but not in the spirit of the founders of their line. For 
sixty years they were content to be priests, and the gov- 
ernment was pontifical. And then for seventy years, be- 
ginning with the first Aristobulus, the royal title was 
resumed, and a monarchy established. But the Herodian 
family succeeded to the Asmonean through Antipater, an 
Idumean by birth, a sort of Mayor of the Palace, and min- 
ister to the Maccabean kings, who prepared the way to the 
throne for his son Herod, called the Great. In the last 
years of his reign the Christian era began (37 b. C.-4 A. D.). 
For over sixty years, since Pompey the Great invaded the 
country and marched into Jerusalem itself, Judea came 
more and more under the power of Rome, and Herod 
was king by imperial permission. His reign was foreign 
enough to be detested, and yet Jewish enough to be main- 
tained. Great works in architecture, the increase of 
commerce, the influx of foreigners, the introduction of 
the two pagan languages, made a great outward change, 
while the national temper continued unchanged, enduring 
Rome and the Herods while it hated them. Then, if ever, 
the old glory of Jerusalem came back, but with the differ- 
ence which belonged to the lapse of a thousand years. 
There was a king, the last, but not of the house of David. 
David's true heir was a little child just born in Bethle- 
hem, waiting for another and larger and holier kingdom 
than that of Herod or Solomon. The king was an Idu- 
mean, and it seemed as if Esau had come back to his 



JERUSALEM. 33 

stolen birthright and to the place of Israel. He had 
splendid powers, shrewdness, energy, persistency. And 
he was guilty of great crimes. He was cruel, whether 
from disposition or from policy, even to the murder of 
his own children, as of the Asmoneans whom he sup- 
planted. He was politic, and so was a Jew in faith. He 
believed with the Jews, and governed with the Romans. 
He left Jerusalem as Jesus found it, as we read about 
it in the gospels. In his reign it was more splendid and 
prosperous than ever. It covered three hundred acres, 
and had a population of from two hundred to two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand. Travelers and pilgrims re- 
sorted to it from all parts of the world. Herod had 
rebuilt the Temple, perhaps because he had also built an 
amphitheatre for foreign games, and it was larger and 
more magnificent than in the days of Solomon. The 
sanctuary itself was of the same dimensions as the first 
Temple, and was probably built upon the old foundations ; 
but he added courts, and porches, and cloisters, and great 
gates, and so immensely enlarged the area as well as the 
magnificence of the sacred building. Greek marble and 
Greek art added to its splendor, so that when the rustic 
Galilean disciples went into it with our Lord they could 
but call his admiring attention : " Master, see what man- 
ner of stones and what buildings are here." Says Mr. 
Ferguson, one of the most competent students of its archi- 
tecture : " It may be safely asserted that the triple Temple 
of Jerusalem — the lower court standing on its magnifi- 
cent terraces, the inner court raised on its platform in 
the centre of this, and the Temple itself, with snow-white 
walls and glittering pinnacles of gold, rising out of this 
group and crowning the whole — must have formed, when 
combined with the beauty of its situation, one of the most 
splendid architectural combinations of the ancient world." ^ 
The words of Dr. Edersheim give us a picture in outline 
1 Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, iii. 1464. 



34 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

of the city itself ; " Passing through ^the Royal Porch, 
and out by the western gate of the Temple, we stand on 
the immense bridge which spans ' the valley of the cheese- 
mongers,' or the Tyropoean, and connects the eastern with 
the western hills of the city. On the right, as we look 
northward, are (on the eastern hill) Ophel, the Priest 
quarter, and the Temple, wondrously beautified and en- 
larged, and rising terrace upon terrace, surmounted by 
massive walls ; a palace, a fortress, a sanctuary of shin- 
ing marble and glittering gold. And beyond it frowns 
the old fortress of Baris, rebuilt by Herod, and named 
after his patron, Antonia. This is the hill of Zion. Right 
below is the cleft of the Tyropoean, and here creeps up 
northward the ' Lower City,' or A era, in the form of a 
crescent, widening into an almost square suburb. Across 
the Tyropoean westward rises the 'Upper City.' If the 
Lower City and suburb form the business quarter, with 
its markets, bazaars, and streets of trades and guilds, the 
Upper City is that of palaces. Here, at the other end 
of the great bridge which connects the Temple with the 
Upper City, is the palace of the Maccabees ; beyond it 
the Xystos, or vast colonnaded enclosure, where popular 
assemblies are held ; there the palace of Ananias, the High 
Priest ; and nearest to the Temple the Council Chamber 
and public archives. Behind it, westward, rise, terrace upon 
terrace, the stately mansions of the Upper City, till quite 
in the northwest corner of the old city we reach the palace 
which Herod had built for himself, — almost a city and 
fortress, flanked by three high towers, and enclosing spa- 
cious gardens. Beyond it again, and outside the city 
walls, both of the first and the second, stretches all north 
of the city the new suburb of Bezetha, or New Town. 
Here on every side are gardens and villas ; here passes 
the great northern road, by which Jesiis went to the place 
of crucifixion." ^ " The hill of Zion is a fair place and the 
^ Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus, i. 112. 



JERUSALEM. 35 

joy of the whole earth ; upon the north side lieth the city 
of the great King ; God is well known in her palaces as 
a sure refuge." ^ 

Such was Jerusalem when Herod died, when Jesus was 
born ; the Jerusalem risen out of the ruin of half a thou- 
sand years before, with something more than its ancient 
splendor growing through all these changeful years. Till 
its second destruction, it now fell more completely under 
the power of Rome. For ten years the son of Herod, 
Archelaus, was Ethnarch of Judea. But with him " the 
sceptre departed from Judah." It became a Koman 
province, with its procurator at Cesarea rather than at 
Jerusalem, ruled not only in the interest but by the offi- 
cials of Rome. There was a great ecclesiastical court 
in Jerusalem with seventy-one members, called the San- 
hedrin, composed of High Priests, — the heads of the 
twenty-four classes into which the priests were divided, — 
the elders, and the scribes. The termination of the vas- 
sal kingship restored it and the Sadducees to political 
importance. There were two principal religious parties 
in the population of Jerusalem, whose origin is rather 
obscure, but which date into the time of the Maccabees. 
It is difficult to say which represented most truly the an- 
cient Judaism. The Pharisees were in the majority. They 
sprang from the ancient pietists who came back from the 
exile cured of all idolatry, and strenuous for the ancestral 
religion. But they degenerated into scrupulous, haughty, 
censorious separatists, — over-pious in forms, and usages, 
and words, and under - pious in spirit and life. Jesus 
justly charged them with the hypocrisy of long prayers 
and short performance, of exactness in the letter and 
carefulness for tradition, without charity or a true and 
spiritual faith. Says Ewald : " In these, various impulses 
to false religion which were involved in the preceding cen- 
turies at length developed themselves with the utmost 
^ Psa. xlviii. 2, 3, Book of Common Prayer, 



36 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

force, and assumed the clearest prominence ; and they 
who wished to be the most pious, and to appear as 
teachers of righteousness of every kind, not excepting the 
highest, were compelled to surround the true religion with 
the greatest darkness and the closest restrictions, like the 
Jesuits of modern times." ^ The Sadducees were the more 
liberal Jews, who in the time of the Maccabees felt the 
Grecian influence and took from it a greater freedom of 
thought. They tried to blend with the Jewish strictness 
the Greek wisdom and freedom, but with no more spiritual 
vitality than there was in the Pharisaism which they op- 
posed. The Pharisees held to Determinism, the Saddu- 
cees to Free Will. The Pharisees were Stoic, the Sad- 
ducees Epicurean. The Pharisees were orthodox, the 
Sadducees liberal. The Pharisees believed in the immor- 
tality of the soul and the existence of angels ; the Sad- 
ducees denied both. The Pharisees held to the traditional 
and oral as well as the Mosaic or written law. The Sad- 
ducees held to the original law, but hardly accepted even 
the Prophets, much less the commentaries of the rabbis. 
The Pharisees carried the people with them. The Sad- 
ducees were chiefly among the higher orders. The one 
party was democratic in its way, the other aristocratic. 
Under Herod the Sadducees lost all political importance, 
and were left to their old theological and ecclesiastical 
disputes with the Pharisees, who were honored and en- 
couraged by the Idumean king for political reasons, as he 
also had absolved his own special partisans, the Hero- 
dians, who exerted no very perceptible, certainly no per- 
manent, influence in public affairs. The Essenes were the 
monks of Judaism, living an ascetic and retired life far 
from the capital, and having no part in its ecclesiastical 
or political life. The Temple and the priesthood remained 
as in the old time, and the people still came to the cap- 
ital for the great feasts. But everywhere, in the villages 
^ History of Israel, v. 369. 



JERUSALEM. 37 

as in the city, since the days of Ezra, there had arisen a 
new system of worship, unknown before the exile. The 
religion of the people was in the synagogue more than in 
the Temple. Religious instruction and devotion went on 
in these meeting-houses, to be found the country through, 
of which there were said to be four hundred and eighty 
in Jerusalem itself. Into them the dispersed Jews, not 
only throughout Palestine, but in Egypt and Greece and 
Italy, gathered for worship and to hear the Scriptures 
read. We hear more of them than of the Temple in the 
New Testament. Our Lord and his Apostles worshipped 
in them. In them and following their organization the 
Christian churches had their beginning. And so Chris- 
tianity became the religion, not of the Temple, of priests 
and sacrifices, but of the synagogue rather, with its min- 
isters, its simple prayers and teachings, its local and inde- 
pendent congregations. 

The last chapter in the history of Jerusalem, for seventy 
years, has written upon it a new name, and is the first 
chapter in a new era of human history. Jesus Christ 
was not born in the city, but in the country. He never 
made his home in Jerusalem, and knew it only by occa- 
sional visits. Six weeks after he was born he was carried 
into the Temple for his presentation, and was recognized, 
even in his infancy, by ancient representatives of the spir- 
itual Israel, who waited there for signs of the new king- 
dom of God, and who " spake of him to all them that were 
looking for the redemption in Jerusalem." ^ It is stated by 
St. Luke that " his parents went to Jerusalem every year 
at the feast of the passover," ^ but how often he went with 
them we do not know. Once, when he was twelve years 
old, we hear that he went with them, and, lingering there 
in the Temple, had a boy's discovery or forecast of his 
divine calling. How many times in the many silent years 
before he began his preaching at Nazareth he went up to 
1 Luke ii. 38. 2 L^ke ii. 41. 



38 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

the great city to see its sights, to learn from its teachers, 
to surprise them as he did in his boyhood, to participate 
in its festivals, there is no report left. Indeed, if the 
fourth gospel had not supplemented the other three, we 
should not know that he was present at more than one of 
five feasts which he actually kept at Jerusalem after he 
became a public teacher. From the first three gospels 
it would seem as if he had chosen to remain in Galilee, 
among a simpler and less bigoted class of people, to lay 
the foundation of his kingdom, rather than face the dan- 
gers of proclaiming himself in the ecclesiastical Capital, 
and seeking his first converts and apostles there. But we 
find him going every year to the great Feast of the Pass- 
over, as perhaps he had been doing all his life. We can 
hardly explain the fanatical hatred of the Pharisees there, 
which pursued him even into Galilee,-^ unless he had be- 
come known in the city, and known in his real character. 
He could hardly have exclaimed, " How often would I have 
gathered thy children together,'' if he had not frequently 
been there, trying to rouse the people by his instructions 
and warnings. His attachment to the family of Lazarus, 
the affection of Joseph of Arimathea for him, the power 
he exerted over such men as Nicodemus, imply not in- 
frequent and transient visits, but some degree of famil- 
iarity.2 

He surrounded himself with Galileans by choice. Among 
them he won disciples. They could understand him. The 
curious and excitable citizens might run after him, but he 
'' did not trust himself to them." ^ He found his apostles 
among fishermen rather than scribes and rabbis. For 
reasons, some of which we can understand, he did not put 
himself into any active connection with the life of Jerusa- 
lem, and waited his time before coming in conflict with its 
authorities. But the end was to come there. It was the 

1 Matt. XV. 1. 2 Neander, Life of Christ, 156. 

8 John ii. 24. 



JERUSALEM. 39 

place, the only place, for the awful climax. It would have 
been an historical, a moral incongruity, for him to be cru- 
cified anywhere else. One day when some Pharisees out 
in the country were advising him to get out of the juris- 
diction of Herod Antipas, for he would certainly kill him, 
he said, "It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jeru- 
salem." 1 He knew his doom was there. He recognized 
the moral fitness of it. He saw into the spirit of the 
place, the political and religious passions, the elements of 
danger, the spiritual delusion, the prejudice, the bigotry, 
which made his death by assassination or execution cer- 
tain. No party was for him, — Pharisees, Sadducees, He- 
rodians, priests, lawyers, — all against him. He had no 
party of his own, even if we count Joseph of Arimathea 
and Nicodemus among his friends. Not an apostle be- 
longed in Jerusalem. He riiade no impression on the life 
of the city, unless in such evanescent feeling as that of 
Palm Sunday, when the streets and Temple were full of 
strangers. 

But if he was not identified with it in his life, he was in 
his death. His crucifixion was the crime of Jerusalem. 
Its authorities compassed it with cunning, and forced it 
upon the Roman governor against his will. The city of 
David, of the prophets, of Jehovah the Almighty, of the 
Temple of God, the capital of Israel, was henceforth and 
forever to carry this brand. It had killed the Saviour of 
the world. But it could not kill the faith he had begotten 
in his little church. The Master had been destroyed ; the 
disciples lived, and made his memory, his death, the life of 
a new world. His cross turned from infamy into glory. 
It became the hope of the humble, and the conqueror of 
the great. The Church put it on its basilicas, the emperor 
on his labarum. The High Priest in the Holy of Holies 
was not so near to God or to the heart of man as his vic- 
tim crucified in the place of a skull. He fell only to rise 
i Luke xiii. 33. 



40 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

again. He died to live more and more, and forever, in 
the life of his Church. He ascended into heaven, but he 
remained a Spirit of life and power and enlargement and 
victory in innumerable disciples world without end. He 
left the Jerusalem that had been for a thousand years, to 
perish, only to erect a New Jerusalem having the imperish- 
able glory of God. For the doom of Jerusalem was al- 
ready in the air. Nemesis was sharpening its sword. And 
Jesus saw the angels of terror descending to avenge his 
own rejection, and close the sad reckoning of its history for 
six hundred years. In forty years his words came true. 
The abomination of desolation stood in the holy place. 
Of the splendid Temple in whose courts he walked and 
spoke, there was not one stone left upon another that was 
not thrown down. Jerusalem was compassed with armies. 
For the time came when the patience of the people was 
exhausted, and they could bear the yoke of the Roman no 
longer. And they rebelled, madly, desperately, with the 
courage of patriotism, but in defiance of the greatest power 
on the globe. High-spirited, intractable, confident of di- 
vine protection, inflamed by Messianic expectations, torn 
in pieces by factions, maddened by the oppressions of 
Rome, they flew into frantic insurrection, and there could 
be but one issue of the struggle. Vespasian and Titus 
came, and after fire, famine, the sword, the siege, had done 
their terrible work, there was nothing left. If we can be- 
lieve Josephus, though it is hard to believe him, more than 
a million human beings lost their lives or their liberty in 
Jerusalem alone. The misery, the carnage, the destruc- 
tion, the desolation, were such that it seemed as if the 
resentment of man or the judgment of God could not fur- 
ther go. If the Christian Church were fired by malignant 
and revengeful passion, and desired its first enemy and the 
murderer of its Lord to suffer condign punishment, it 
could only have cried out in pity, " Stop, Lord, for it is 
enough ! " 



JERUSALEM. 41 

And yet Jerusalem really fell, not when the armies of 
Titus broke down its walls, and burnt its Temple, and ex- 
tinguished its life. The true destruction of the city was 
not in its physical demolition, but in its spiritual over- 
throw. It fell not so much by the fierce blow of Rome 
as before that gentle word of Jesus spoken in a woman's 
ear in the vale of Sychar, — " Woman, believe me, the 
hour Cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor 
yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. But the hour Com- 
eth, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship 
the Father in spirit and truth." ^ Those words blew away 
stately stones of temples the world over, as if they had 
been mist, and turned worship from a thing of priests and 
altars and buildings into a spiritual transaction having all 
times and places for its own. The city of God was hence- 
forth to be no local Jerusalem, but a universal brother- 
hood, with Christ for its king, and the round earth and 
the arching sky, or rather the larger human heart, for its 
temple. Jerusalem had no more place. Its religious pri- 
macy had come to an end. Its office in the spiritual edu- 
cation of mankind was closed. It had not only exhausted 
its power ; it had turned its back on the true light, and 
shown itself unworthy and incapable of the spiritual en- 
franchisement which stood at its gates. 

Judaism lost its opportunity. " Its altar fires should and 
might have been extinguished by something better than 
Jewish blood. Caiaphas should and might have been the 
first Christian bishop of Jerusalem. The whole Jewish 
priesthood should and might have led the way from types 
to antitype. And the whole Jewish people, in Palestine 
and everywhere else, from Spain to China, should and 
might have accepted the Prophet of whom Moses spake. 
But madness ruled the hour. They hanged their prophet 
on a tree, hissing that awful prayer which God has been 
answering ever since, ' His blood be on us, and on our 
1 John iv. 21-23. 



42 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

children.' " ^ Henceforth the religion of God was to pass 
from it, and turn to the Gentiles. 

Christianity had its birth in Jerusalem, not from its 
being the home of Christ or of his apostles, for it was 
not ; not because its theology, its church, its teachers and 
leaders, its traditions, or its hopes of a Messiah had any 
influence in shaping the doctrine or the course of Jesus, 
for they had none ; not because it accepted him, or felt his 
power, for it rejected him, and never became a Christian 
city. But it was the capital of the old religion ; and into 
that ancient inheritance Christianity entered. It inher- 
ited the treasured monotheism of twenty centuries. The 
Law and the Prophets, the whole divine revelation, from 
the fathers of the Jewish race down, belonged to it. It 
joined itself to the history of Israel, and was not to be de- 
prived of the past revelation of God. It was to make the 
old new, and create a better and spiritual and larger 
Israel, in which should be neither Jew nor Gentile, but 
the children of God in all lands. But it was not to be 
simply a transformed, baptized Judaism, preserving what- 
ever was true, spiritual, immortal, in the religion of Israel. 
It had a grander, diviner future if it only understood its 
mission, and would assert its liberty. Its first task was to 
disengage itself from Judaism. It had to fight for its 
independence. It had not only to continue the battle with 
the hostile Judaism which had snatched the life of its 
leader. The conflict was in the bosom of the church itself. 
That tried hard to be Christian without ceasing to be Jew- 
ish. It wanted even the Gentiles to become Christians by 
becoming Jews first. The message which came from cer- 
tain ones of Judea to Antioch, " Except ye be circumcised 
after the custom of Moses, ye cannot be saved," ^ was its 
watchword. This was the difficult problem, to bring to- 
gether Jews and Gentiles in a united church without the 

1 R. D. Hitchcock, Eternal Atonement, p. 196. 

2 Acts XV. 1. 



JERUSALEM. 43 

enforced obligation of the Law of Moses. This was the con- 
test, to establish equality, and keep Judaism out of Chris- 
tianity. The champion of liberty was a converted Jew who 
had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees, their most learned 
and ablest rabbi. And he determined not to have a deci- 
sion at Antioch, in a Greek city, in a mixed church, but to 
go up to Jerusalem and face the question where Judaism 
was strongest, and where a decision would be worth some- 
thing. He wanted a verdict for all time. Fifteen years 
before, he went out of Jerusalem armed with power to de- 
stroy the young Church. He now returns to save it, not 
from the enmity of Jews who would not believe and wanted 
to destroy it, but from Jews who believed, but only in a 
Jewish gospel, and wanted to entomb it. The decision 
was for liberty, and a church large enough for Jew and 
Gentile together. And the larger providential decision was 
the same. The Gentiles came in faster than the Jews, 
and Judaism shrank, even if its leaven has never been en- 
tirely lost. By the working of a mighty power which was 
in the Church and in the gospel, even by the free spirit 
of God, Christ broke down the middle wall of partition 
between the races, and made both one. And then came 
the crisis, the great day of God's judgment, when the city 
and the Temple venerable with the reverence of ages, and 
clothed even to Jews scattered through all countries with 
inviolable sanctity, were finally demolished. That de- 
stroyed the wild hopes of a conquering and national Mes- 
siah, a new Maccabeus. And it took out of the way a 
great moral and historical obstacle to the progress of the 
new faith. From their wide dispersion the Jews, in whose 
faith Christ Jesus bad taken a place, could no longer look 
back to the home of their ancestral religion, and they rec- 
ognized the providence, and the providential reason, by 
which it had been removed. Their Christianity more eas- 
ily absorbed their Judaism, and they found that, by out- 
ward compulsion as well as by an inward choice, they were 
no longer under Moses, but under Christ. 



44 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

Jerusalem stands, then, not only for Judaism, but for a 
type of religion, even of Christianity, which happily was 
not to be perpetual. A religion originating among Jews, 
and inheriting their Scriptures, had hard work to sever 
itself from Judaizing tendencies. They prolonged their 
influence, and infected the new faith with the old spirit. 
The Epistle to the Hebrews shows the hold which the 
obsolescent religion had upon Jewish Christians. They 
missed the old ritual. They clung to circumcision, the 
Sabbath, the ceremonial law. They could not readily 
believe that the laws, the institutions, which were their 
national inheritance, and which went back to the Ex- 
odus, which had upon them the name of Moses and 
of Jehovah Himself, were transient and to be given up. 
And so they wanted to mix Judaism and Christianity, 
with Christ for a second Moses. They turned Christian- 
ity into that modified Judaism against which Paul fought 
with such courageous persistency, as we see in his Epistle 
to the Galatians. And this issued in Ebionitism, a con- 
traction and degradation of Christianity to a Judaic pat- 
tern, asserting the universal and perpetual validity of the 
Mosaic Law, finally reducing Jesus to be the last and best 
prophet of their race, and refusing the grander scope, and 
spiritual largeness, and universal mission of a redeeming 
and victorious gospel. And this has never quite passed 
away. The free spirit of the Gospel has often felt its 
bonds. Moses has sometimes shared the rule with Christ 
in His own Church, and the New Dispensation has felt 
upon it the shadow of the dead hand of the Old. Ritual- 
ism has dominated faith, and the letter the spirit. Says 
St. Paul to the Galatians : " Sinai is a mountain in Ara- 
bia, and answereth to the Jerusalem that now is ; for she 
is in bondage [to the Romans] with her children. But 
the Jerusalem that is above is free, which is our mother." ^ 

To Jerusalem belongs the first place among the cities of 
^ Galatians iv. 25, 26, Rev. Version. 



JERUSALEM. 45 

our faith. It began there. " Beginning at Jerusalem " was 
the last word of our Lord to His Church before it had taken 
its first step. Had it stopped there, had it remained with- 
in the boundaries of Judaism there represented, probably 
it would have died, like a hundred sects, Jewish, Pagan, 
Christian. But it was not to stop. It could not stay, as the 
Jews had not stayed. It went wherever Jews went. But 
it went as the power of God and the wisdom of God to 
Jews and Greeks, and to both alike.^ It went to Samaria, 
to the maritime towns of Phoenicia, to Cyprus, to Damas- 
cus, to Antioch. But it went into the synagogue till it 
came to Antioch ; and there it came into immediate con- 
tact with Greeks who were not Jews. And so Antioch, 
with less antiquity, with a shorter history, with a more 
transient influence, with no sanctity of its own, with 
minor historic significance, simply as the gate to a grander 
future in the diffusion of Christianity, took precedence of 
Jerusalem itself. 

It was then more than three hundred years old. The 
Greek kings of Syria, and afterwards the Roman govern- 
ors, had made it their capital. It was a large and beau- 
tiful, even stately city, on the banks of the Orontes. It 
was counted, after Rome and x4.1exandria, the third city in 
the empire. It was, like Alexandria, a point of confluence 
between the East and West. It anticipated Constantino- 
ple. It had a large Jewish colony, with their synagogues. 
Thither flew sparks from the flame of Pentecost. The 
murder of Stephen sent others, though, it is stated, 
" preaching the word to none but unto Jews only. But 
there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, 
who, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the 
Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus." ^ There came 
Barnabas, and with him came Paul, as he was then called, 
from Tarsus, both eager for conciliation and liberty. 
Henceforth the Jew and the Greek are equal, missions 
1 1 Cor. i. 24. 2 Acts xi. 20. 



46 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

begin, and the whole world opens to the gospel. The 
new religion, released from Judaism, takes its true position. 
Here it receives its true and lasting name. Its disciples, 
who called themselves " saints," who were known by their 
Jewish enemies as Nazarenes, " were called Christians first 
at Antioch." And Antioch became, in its way, a Gentile 
Jerusalem, the centre of missionary movement into the 
pagan world. 

The time had now come when the Jews could no more 
take the old delight in Jerusalem. The holy and beauti- 
ful house where their fathers worshipped was burned with 
fire, and all their pleasant things were laid waste. There 
was no restoration. History was to forsake the Jew, and 
divide itself with the Christian and the Moslem. The 
enthusiasm with which the Jews saluted Jerusalem, and 
refused to forget her, was to transfer itself and kindle 
into even a fiercer flame among the people of Christen- 
dom. A new pilgrimage was to seek the Holy City 
through many centuries, started by Helena, the mother of 
the first Christian Emperor. Constantine, more than two 
centuries and a half after the Flavian emperors had bat- 
tered it into dust and ruin, built a magnificent church 
over the sepulchre of the Christ whom the Jews had cast 
out as evil, and the Romans had crucified as a malefactor. 
The tomb took the place of the Temple. The religion 
which in the beginning found its inspiration in itself, and 
a Saviour invisible, now sought every spot in the Holy 
Land made sacred by His presence, and counted it a vir- 
tue and a spiritual help to stand on the ground from 
which a divine influence seemed to emanate because He 
had been there. For curiosity, for devotion, for penance, 
for inspiration, rich and poor, laymen and monks, princes 
and prelates, saints with their love and penitents with 
their burden, went, sometimes in flocks, to even doubtful 
places ; to spurious relics they gave a veneration belong- 
ing only to invisible realities. Pilgrimage became an in- 



JERUSALEM. 47 

stitution, and a pilgrim acquired merit and sanctity, if 
not spiritual excellence, from his journey. Caravansaries 
and hospitals were provided for him ; his pilgrimage was 
an expiation for all his sins ; and he carried home the 
shirt he wore when he entered Jerusalem to be used as 
his winding-sheet, in which he would certainly be trans- 
ported into Paradise. 

And so Jerusalem became to the Christian what it had 
been to the Jew. The Persian, the Saracen, the Turk, 
became in turn its masters, and still the Christian pil- 
grims sought its holy places with inextinguishable desire. 
If at first they were received as guests, at last they were 
abused as intruders. And then came the Crusaders, con- 
tending for Palestine and against Islamism for two hun- 
dred years. At the end of the eleventh century the in- 
dignation of Christendom waxed hot against the Moslem 
who held possession of the sepulchre of Christ, against 
the barbarous Seljukian who maltreated its pious visitors. 
This indignation found a voice in Urban the Pope and 
Pet3r the Hermit, and started towards the Holy Land the 
wild rabble that followed Walter the Penniless, and the 
more disciplined army that followed Godfrey of Bouillon. 
Christendom armed itself against Mohammedanism, and 
renewed the conflict between West and East, which 
seemed to have been settled by Charles Martel on the 
plains of Tours almost five hundred years before. In the 
last year of the eleventh century Jerusalem fell before the 
arms of Godfrey. Eighty-eight years later it fell again 
before the siege of Saladin, the crescent took the place of 
the cross, and the Latin kingdom came to an end. To- 
day it is a Turkish city, its splendor gone, its life poor, its 
religion mixed, its history a reminiscence, its restoration a 
dream, its name, its symbolic significance, its projDhetic 
glories, its forfeited inheritance, transferred to the New 
Jerusalem comino- down from God out of heaven. 

For there at last in some far future, in this world, in 



48 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

worlds beyond, is to be the consummation of the kingdom 
of God. What is sown in weakness shall be raised in 
power. What began in Jerusalem shall be known every- 
where. The Messiah of the Jew shall be the Saviour of 
all men. The process of amelioration, of redemption, 
slowly moving through the weary years, reaches comple- 
tion at last. Man " working out the beast " rises to fel- 
lowship with God, and the groaning creation issues in a 
new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. And beyond 
is heaven, the hope of the penitent, the aspiration of the 
saint, the promise of Christ's ascension, the restoration of 
all loss, the supreme beatitude, the perfected society of 
all renewed spirits, the escape from earth's falsehood and 
wrong, the eternal vision and communion of God. For 
whatever Christianity shall do in this world for its trans- 
formation, beyond the veil whither Christ is gone, in unseen 
and heavenly places, is the ultimate and immortal fulfill- 
ment of all possibilities, He and His being glorified to- 
gether. 

Such dream, more or less obscurely, has disturbed or 
fascinated great souls, has visited humanity almost every- 
where in its sleep, when it is nigh awaking. The Apoca- 
lypse projects upon the screen of the future its picture of 
that final consummation. And what other vision, what 
grander ideal, should a Jew, a Christian Jew, have of the 
coming of His Lord's kingdom ; into what picture shall 
he put it but of that great city which had so filled Jewish 
history for its last thousand years ? Out of that dead 
Jerusalem is evolved the likeness of the living and eter- 
nal city of God. It is a gorgeous picture of a new city, 
all gems, all gold, a winterless climate, with fruit every 
month, fresh and pure with rivers of water, no shadows 
or terrors of the night, with no gates, but the nations of 
the world walking its streets in spiritual freedom, the 
kings of the nations filling it with all glory and honor. 
There is no temple in it any longer, for in a Christian 



JERUSALEM. 49 

Apocalypse there could be hope of its restoration, be- 
cause henceforth " the Lord God, the Almighty, and the 
Lamb are the Temple thereof." There human history 
ends, not where it began, in Paradise, in a garden, amidst 
the freedom of spontaneous nature, but in a city, the 
greatest work of man, the top and sum of human civiliza- 
tion, — in the city of God, the capital, not of a passing 
nationality, but of a new and holier and perpetual Jeru- 
salem, worthy to be the Bride of Christ. 

It is Jerusalem, made new in the Spirit, and by the 
power of the Christ it rejected, which draws the exile's 
longing, and becomes the canticle of homesick souls. 
They sing such hymns as, "O Mother dear, Jerusalem," 
and "Jerusalem the Golden," and "Jerusalem, my Happy 
Home." We find it in the " De Contemptu Mundi " of 
Bernard of Clugny ; in the " O Quanta Qualia " of the 
brilliant and unfortunate Abelard ; sung at Vespers by 
Heloise and hep nuns in the Abbey of the Paraclete : — 

•' O what shall be, when shall be, that holy Sabbath day, 
Which heavenly care shall ever keep and celebrate alway, 
When rest is found for weary limbs, when labor hath reward, 
When everything for evermore is joyful in the Lord ? 

" The true Jerusalem above, the holy town, is there. 

Whose duties are so full of joy, whose joy so free from care ; 
Where disappointment cometh not to check the longing heart. 
And where the heart, in ecstasy, hath gained her better part. 

" O glorious King, O happy state, O palace of the blest ! 
O sacred peace and holy joy, and perfect, heavenly rest ! 
To thee aspire thy citizens in glory's bright array. 
And what they feel and want, they know they strive in vain to say. 

" For while we wait and long for home, it shall be ours to raise 
Our songs and chants and vows and prayers in that dear country's 

praise ; 
And from these Babylonian streams to lift our weary eyes, 
And view the city that we love descending from the skies. 
4 



60 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

" There, there, secure from every ill, in freedom we shall sing 
The songs of Zion, hindered here by days of suffering, 
And unto thee, our gracious Lord, our praises shall confess 
That all our sorrow hath been good, and thou by pain canst bless." 



II. ALEXANDRIA. 

The nameless person, the mystic figure, who appeared 
in the shadows of the night to St. Paul when he had come 
to the coast of the ^gean, before he crossed for the first 
time into Europe, was " a man of Macedonia ; " and that 
is all we know of him. Whence he came, who sent him, 
what he did afterwards, appearing and disappearing, is not 
told. His message, " Come over into Macedonia and help 
us," was the first European summons to Christianity to 
advance into the great field of its future triumphs. Why 
it came from there rather than from Athens, or Corinth, 
or Rome even, we do not know. But we do know that 
the new religion owed a great debt to that Macedonian 
power, a faint echo of whose voice it then heard. That 
power had begun to make itself felt beyond its own rug- 
ged mountains some three centuries and more before. It 
had destroyed the freedom of Greece, aspiring itself to be 
Greek. It had returned the Persian invasion, and over- 
coming the Persian arms had spread its conquests to the 
Euphrates and the Nile. It was not a Greek power, and 
was counted the enemy of Greece. But it was a powerful 
agent in diffusing Hellenic power and culture, in sending 
the Greek language and literature and spirit far and wide, 
and so indirectly preparing a way for Christianity. The 
one potent thing it did was to found a new city near the 
mouth of the Nile, which became the second city of the 
world. It was left to Alexander to see the advantages of 
a site which the wisdom of Egypt had for ages overlooked, 
and with a look and a word to call into being the rival, 
which at last became the subject, of Rome ; a city which, 
according to Niebuhr, he designed to be the capital of the 



52 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

universal empire he aspired and failed to found. What- 
ever he designed, whatever he may have anticipated, 
Alexandria became the great monument of his genius, as 
it became the tomb of his remains. Nothing else which 
he did, no triumph of his arms, left such a mark on the 
history of the world. He brought the East and the West 
together, the Greek and the Oriental thought and life, and 
the point of junction was Alexandria. What he began it 
was left for the Ptolemies to finish ; but from beginning 
to end it was the city of Alexander. It became a new 
Greece beyond the sea. 

It was at an angle where the three continents meet. 
With a lake on one side and the Mediterranean on the 
other, it had a secure and spacious harbor, the entrance 
lighted by the Pharos, 400 feet high, the greatest light- 
house of the world. It was fifteen miles in circuit, and 
shaped like a trooper's cloak, seven miles long and three 
broad. It had a plan, as the ancient cities generally had 
not, with two main streets, 240 feet wide, crossing each 
other at right angles in the middle of the city, and giving 
draught for cool northerly breezes from the sea. It had 
quarters for the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Jews, 
with a population of 600,000. A third of the city was 
given up to public parks and palaces. Its docks and 
aqueducts, the mole nearly a mile long, its museum and 
librar}^ its court-house and necropolis, with the " soma " 
in which the Greek kings of Egypt as well as the great 
Macedonian conqueror were buried, and. most magnifi- 
cent of all, the Temple of Serapis, the great god of the 
place, gave it the solid splendor which belongs to the great 
capitals of the world. A mart of commerce, it became 
the home of philosophy. First Greek then Roman, first 
pagan then Christian, the city of the Ptolemies, of Cleopa- 
tra and Hypatia, of Philo and Athanasius, of Euclid the 
mathematician and Antony the eremite, — for a time it 
held a great place in the history of the world. It was not 



ALEXANDRIA. 53 

the ships in its harbor, or the spices and dyes of Arabia 
and India, or the corn of Egypt, enriching its traffic ; it 
was the intellectual excitement, the mingling of religions, 
the contact of philosophies and the commerce of thought, 
which made it great and renowned. It was the confluence 
of so many elements — national, commercial, intellectual, 
and religious — which made it superior to Antioch and 
next to Rome, even more cosmopolitan than the city of 
the Caesars. The mysticism of the East and the culture 
of the West found in it equal hospitality. Both Judaism 
and Christianity took from it its unique stamp. 

For nearly three hundred years (323-30 B. c), the 
period between Alexander and Caesar, the Macedonian 
dynasty of the Ptolemies ruled at Alexandria. There 
were thirteen of them. The first three, whose reigns cov- 
ered the first century of the Greek rule in Egypt, were 
wise and energetic princes. They were Greeks in spirit, 
and made Alexandria a Greek city. They were friends 
and patrons of learning. The first was a great builder. 
He built the great lighthouse on the island of Pharos ; the 
causeway, a mile long, which connected it with the city; 
the hippodrome ; the mausoleum where Alexander was 
buried ; and the immense Temple of Serapis. He founded 
the Museum, a great university, with its library of 700,000 
volumes, embracing the collected literature of the world. 
The Museum and the Serapeum were not only splendid in 
architecture, but had a scientific glory beyond that of por- 
ticoes and gardens. His son and grandson followed in 
his steps, and made the city and the kingdom great and 
prosperous. Alexandria became the home of letters. It 
was not Athens, the city of Plato, Sophocles, Phidias, but 
it had an ampler and more varied life. For a time it sur- 
passed Antioch and Rome. Their successors degenerated, 
till with the gifted and voluptuous Cleopatra the Greek 
rule ended, and the naval battle of Actium gave Egypt to 
the Roman Caesars.^ 

^ Pressens^, i. 265. 



54 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

Thirteen hundred years before, the Hebrews had been 
thrust out of Egypt. Alexander and the Ptolemies were 
now encouraging their descendants to come back. Alex- 
andria became a Jewish almost as much as a Greek city. 
*' Out of Egypt I called my son," God said of the nation 
of Israel in the beginning.^ And now he began to call 
them back, that a second time under Egyptian discipline 
they might reconnect themselves with the world from 
which they had been called out and had separated them- 
selves for a thousand years. Eameses thrust them out. 
Alexander brought them back. As the city grew they 
increased, and in time formed two fifths of its vast popu- 
lation, and more than an eighth of the population of the 
country. It was a new Jerusalem in Egypt. And yet 
they became Alexandrian Jews, and Judaism here devel- 
oped a new type. It was Hellenized in its new surround- 
ings. The Greek learning came at least to the doors of 
the Jewish synagogue. 'Under the beneficent toleration 
of the early Ptolemies, in an atmosphere so much freer 
and more vital than that of Jerusalem, amidst scholars and 
philosophers, the Jewish Church felt new influences, — 
some helpful, some harmful, some transient, some which 
passed into both churches, the Jewish and the Christian, 
to be a possession forever. Not like their countrymen at 
home following the fierce fight of the Maccabees, nor 
like the Jews of Babylon spinning such fancies as at last 
were woven into the Talmud, in Alexandria the Jews, 
clinging to the faith of their fathers, felt the force of the 
new world into which they were cast. For business, for 
intercourse, they learned the Greek language. For cul- 
ture they learned the Greek literature. Their thought 
and life could not help being touched by the Greek spirit. 
They w^ere Jews, and hence conservative and exclusive. 
But they were Jews, and hence alert, and not impassive to 
the stir of that strange world in which they were seeking 
their fortune. 

^ Hosea xi. 1; Matt. ii. 15. 



ALEXANDRIA. 55 

It was a great event when the Old Testament was put 
into Greek. And this was done by the Alexandrian Jews. 
It would be most natural to suppose that this was done to 
meet their own wants. Many of them did not speak He- 
brew ; all of them spoke Greek, and they needed a Greek 
Bible. Possibly there were even Greeks who would like 
to read it. But this would have been too simple an ac- 
count of its origin, and so a literary and royal origin was 
invented. There may be some truth in the story told in a 
letter of Aristeas, a courtier of Ptolemy II., which is now 
counted spurious. This legend is, that Ptolemy Philadel- 
phus wanted a copy of the Jewish Scriptures for his great 
library, and was advised to apply to the High Priest at 
Jerusalem ; that seventy-two delegates were sent, six for 
each of the twelve tribes, who were lodged in thirty-six 
cells on the island of Pharos, where, in seventy-two days, 
as tradition adds, separate from each other, each produced 
the same version exactly to a letter. To sift the truth out 
of the stories told about the production of the Septuagint 
is not easy. Whether it originated with the king and a 
literary motive, or the Jews themselves and a religious 
motive, there are internal signs that the translators were 
Jews of Alexandria, and not sent from Palestine ; that 
there were not seventy of them, though there were sev- 
eral ; that it was translated in parts, and not all at once ; 
that the translation of the five books of the Law was the 
earliest and best. 

Whatever the origin of this first version of the Old 
Testament, there can be no doubt of its historic impor- 
tance and its wide and permanent effects. Heretofore 
locked up in Hebrew, the great truths of Judaism could 
now become known to the Greek and the Roman. And 
it was the Greek and Roman world into which was to go 
the later as well as the earlier revelation, and not through 
the Hebrew, but the Greek tongue. It was the Greek 
Old Testament which prepared for the Greek New Testa- 



56 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

ment. Says Dean Stanley : " It was the Septuagint which 
was the Bible of the Evangelists and Apostles in the first 
century, and of the Christian Church for the first age of its 
existence, which is still the only recognized, authorized 
text of the Eastern Church, and the basis of the only 
authorized text of the Latin Church. Widely as it dif- 
fers from the Hebrew Scriptures in form, in substance, 
in chronology, in language ; unequal, imperfect, grotesque 
as are its renderings, — it has nevertheless, through large 
periods of ecclesiastical history, rivalled if not superseded 
those Scriptures themselves." ^ The Jews saw its signifi- 
cance. Those in Alexandria kept the day of its publica- 
tion as a festival, and visited with rejoicing the cells on 
the island of Pharos where, according to tradition, it had 
been translated by miraculous assistance. The Jews in 
Palestine, on the other hand, considered it a profane 
attempt to put into a strange language truths which it 
was impossible for it to express, and too sacred for it if it 
could, and so kept the day of publication as a fast, as if 
the Gentiles had defiled the sanctuary of God. But the 
Word of God is not bound. It could not be contained 
in one language, nor even in one version. The writers of 
the New Testament quoted from the Old, and oftener 
from the translation than the original, as if the essential 
truth were in both. The Syriac and the Latin came 
before long, and so a long line of versions follows it into 
all written languages, and even into those before unwrit- 
ten. Jerome at Bethlehem, and Luther in the Wartburg, 
and Tyndale in Antwerp, and Eliot at Nonantum, and 
Judson at Rangoon, answer to each other. The company 
of translators in the Jerusalem Chambers at Westminster 
join hands across two thousand years with the company 
who in the beginning on that Alexandrian island gave the 
Old Testament the liberty of a new tongue. 

Alexandria gave to the world a Greek Bible, and, with 
1 Jewish Church, iii. 287. 



ALEXANDRIA. 67 

the Greek language prevailing as it did, it was a great 
gift. The Hebrew was passing out of the living speech 
of men. It could not be the vehicle of a universal reli- 
gion such as was about to emerge from the bosom of 
Judaism. That was to be preached in Greek. Its Scrip- 
tures were to be written in Greek. It was to go first into 
a Greek world. The Septuagint went before it and with 
it. The Old and the New were both in one tongue, and 
could be read together, just as we read them. 

And the strange books which we call Apocrypha, com- 
ing between the two Testaments, included in the Septua- 
gint version, w^ere Greek rather than Hebrew, and had 
more or less to do with Alexandria. If the Septuagint 
brought Judaism into the Grecian world of thought, the 
Apocrypha helped bring that near to Judaism. The 
books are of very different character and value, some of 
them with more Hebrew in them, some with more Greek. 
SsLjs Dean Stanley; "Some of them, like the Book of 
Judith, are apparently mere fables ; some, like the addi- 
tions to the Books of Ezra, Esther, and Daniel, are ex- 
amples of the free and facile mode in which, at that time, 
the earlier sacred books were improved, modified, en- 
larged, corrected, by the Alexandrian critics ; some, like 
the Books of the Maccabees, are attempts, more or less 
exact, at contemporary or nearly contemporary history ; 
some, like the Psalter of Solomon, have never gained an 
entrance even into this outer court of the Sacred Writ- 
ings ; some, like the second Book of Esdras and the Book 
of Enoch, have attained a biblical authority, but only 
within a very limited range. But there are two which 
tower above the rest, and which, even by those who most 
disparage the others, are held in reverential esteem. The 
one is the recommendation of the theology of Palestine 
to Alexandria, — The Wisdom of the Son of Sirach ; the 
other is the recommendation of the theology of Alexan- 
dria to Palestine, — The Wisdom of Solomon." ^ 
1 Jewish Church, iii. 295. 



58 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

This apocryphal literature had in it none of the old in- 
spiration, and exerted scarcely a perceptible influence 
over the Christian Scriptures which followed it. It has 
been recognized, and sanctioned, and used by the Roman 
Church, especially since the Council of Trent. Some of 
the Reformed churches, like the Dutch, authorize its use 
for lessons in public worship, or, like the Anglican, have it 
read, not for settlement of doctrine, but " for example of 
life and instruction in manners." And yet it had its part 
in that process, that Alexandrian process, by which Juda- 
ism came in contact with the outer world. In its mingled 
fable and philosophy it belonged to that period of decay, of 
departed inspiration, of spiritual transition, which w^as to 
be followed by the new and supreme revelation of Christ. 

This process, which began in the Greek translation of 
the Old Testament, was completed in Philo, the greatest 
of the Alexandrian Jews. The union of Hellenism and 
Judaism culminated in him. He was of good birth and 
ample fortune. He came to his majority at about the 
beginning of the Christian era. In him Greek learning 
and Jewish faith were united. And this was his attempt 
to harmonize the religion of his fathers with contempo- 
rary thought ; to discover Plato and Zeno in Moses ; to 
read Greek ideas into the Hebrew story. Numenius, a 
writer of the second century, asks, " What is Plato but 
Moses talking Greek ? " Quite as well he might have 
asked, " What is Moses but Plato talking Hebrew? " For 
the questions represent the two sides of the new eclecti- 
cism which in the beginning had more Hebrew, and in 
the end more Greek, but which, whether new Platonism 
or new Mosaism, found its chief if not only exponent in 
Philo. Of course it was necessary for him to give a new 
interpretation to the old story, to find allegories and sym- 
bols in it, to make figures of its literal statements. He 
even set aside the literal meaning when it seemed un- 
worthy of God. His God was hardly the personal God 



ALEXANDRIA. 59 

of the Old Testament, but a philosophical deity, com- 
pounded of Platonic and Stoic conceptions, contradictory 
as they were, — a God separated from the world, and yet 
immanent in it. His Logos, or Word, furnished the 
name at least, if not the substance, of the conception, 
employed by St. John in the fourth Gospel to set forth 
the manifestation of God in Jesus. How far Philonism, 
or the Alexandrian Judaism which he represents, colored 
the New Testament, is in question.^ Whether the Epistle 
to the Hebrews was written by ApoUos, the Alexandrian 
Jew, or not, " it bears marks of Alexandrian culture." ^ 
That the speculations which followed the introduction of 
Christianity into Alexandria took their impulse, and in 
part their character, from Philo, there is no doubt. New 
Platonism coming to birth in the -third century was but 
the completion of a philosophical tendency taking rise 
with him. The use he made of Plato in connection with 
Judaism is the use in a similar and broader way made by 
Ammonius Saccas in the beginning of the third century, 
and later by Plotinus, by Jamblichus in the fourth cen- 
tury, and by Proclus in the fifth. It was the expiring 
effort of paganism to justify itself philosophically, to 
arrest the progress of Christianity, if it could, and to 
gather up into one the fundamental ideas of all philos- 
ophies and all religions. It aspired to be a religion as 
well as a philosophy, and, while taking something from 
Christianity as well as giving something to it, the two came 
into vehement struggle for the possession of the world. 
The issue of such a conflict could not be uncertain. As 
a philosophy, no such mixture of Greek thought with 
Oriental fancies could solve the problem of existence, or 
satisfy the wants of the soul. It tried to relieve the scep- 
ticism in which all previous philosophy, and all the 
thought and life of paganism, had left the human mind. 

^ Ederslieim, Life and Times of Jesus, i. 56. 
2 Lightfoot, Philipvians, 223. 



60 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

Its effort after certainty ended in disappointment, and its 
assault upon Christianity ended in failure. 

A part of the Alexandrian thought of the time, and 
cognate with New Platonism, was Gnosticism. It was not 
so much a definable system as a congeries of sects. It 
had no single author, though its different schools had 
their heads.^ The Alexandrian Gnostics were influenced 
by the Platonic doctrines, leaning to emanation ; while 
the Syrian Gnostics felt the influence of Parsism, and in- 
clined to dualism. Into it were fused Oriental mysticism, 
Hellenic philosophy, the Judaism of Alexandria, and such 
elements of Christianity as it could absorb. It was a 
sort of spiritual Free Masonry. It made salvation rest 
on knowledge rather than on faith, and an esoteric knowl- 
edge at that. It rarefied the Gospel into a speculation, 
and the Redeemer into a phantom. In speculation it 
took the forms of imagination rather than logic, and is- 
sued in a sort of mythological theosophy, or, as in the 
system of Valentinus, the most brilliant of all, a religious 
romance.^ It grappled with the problem of evil and its 
origin. It worked at the old problem of the derivation of 
the finite from the infinite. It set God and the world, 
spirit and matter, in antagonism, separating the Creator of 
the world, or the demiurge, from God, and resolving the 
humanity of the Redeemer into a Docetic illusion. Pagan 
or Christian, there was no essential difference. " Both," 
says Bigg, " start from the same terrible problem, both 
arrive at the same conclusion, the existence of a second 
and imperfect God." ^ Ethically it ran into asceticism, 
and hatred of the world as essentially evil, and in some 
of its sects into Antinomian license. Its influence in the 
Church can be traced, but how strong it was, and how 
numerous its adherents, it is not easy to tell. Formidable 
in the beginning, its life was comparatively brief. Says 

1 Gieseler, i. 2 Scliaff, History, i. 225. 

2 Bigg, Christian Platonists, p. 30. 



ALEXANDRIA. 61 

Hase : " Even in the third century Gnosticism had lost 
all creative energy, in the fourth it was completely power- 
less, and in the sixth only a few vestiges of it remained." ^ 
And now into this Alexandrian world came Christian- 
ity. Tlie earliest tradition says it was first preached by 
Barnabas. But the Church there always claimed his kins- 
man, St. Mark, for its founder. Beside his tomb, from 
which in the ninth century Venice stole his remains, the 
Patriarchs of the Alexandrian Church were elected. The 
Church grew, and was rich and strong. Christianity felt 
the influences of the place, and developed a new, unique 
type, corresponding to the intellectual life in the midst of 
which it found disciples and teachers. Either in partici- 
pation or in conflict, it must meet the thought which was 
stirring. It must instruct its own converts. It must de- 
fend its own doctrines. And this especially it must do in 
the face of a pagan university, whose lectures attracted 
young and active minds, whose professors subjected the 
new faith to their merciless criticism, after the manner of 
Celsus and Porphyry, or antagonized it with new Plato- 
nism and Gnosticism, like Ammonius and Basilides. And 
so sprang up the theological seminary where catechumens 
and clergy came under training, and out of which issued 
the peculiar type of the Alexandrian theology. 

It had three great masters, Pantsenus, Clement, and 
Origen. The school itself is the chief monument of the 
first, for no writings of his remain. He was a converted 
Stoic, full of the spirit of the Gospel, and yet turning to 
its defence the knowledge which he had learned in the 
schools of philosophy, using instead of repudiating it. His 
successors acknowledge their debt to him, and if he left 
no writings, he left something better in his disciples, who 
felt his inspiration and carried on his work. This was 
especially true of Clement, — Titus Flavins Clemens, of 
Greek extraction, though bearing a Roman and even an 
1 Church History, p. 86. 



62 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

imperial name. Born in paganism, he travelled far and 
wide seeking after truth. He listened to all the philoso- 
phers, he studied the literatures of Italy and Greece, and, 
lifting the veil from all religions, at last found repose in 
Christianity and made Alexandria his home. He was cap- 
tivated by Pantsenus, and in the year 189 A. D. succeeded 
him in charge of the School of the Catechists, teaching in 
it twelve years, until driven out by the persecution under 
Septimius Severus. He was never canonized in the Ro- 
man Church, any more than Origen. But doctor, apolo- 
gist, father, saint even, he was, as truly as Irenaeus, or 
Clement of Rome. From his education he was quite as 
much a man of letters as a theologian. Dr. Bigg classes 
him with Jeremy Taylor. He says : " His love of letters 
is sincere, and the great classics of Greece are his friends 
and counsellors. Even the comic poets are often by his 
side. If we look at his swelling periods, at his benignity 
and liberality and the limitations of his liberality, at his 
quaint and multifarious learning, at his rare blending of 
gentle piety and racy humour, we shall find in him a strik- 
ing counterpart to our own author of the Liberty of 
Prophesying." ^ Prom his education, too, he belonged to 
the liberal school of apologists. He came from the Greek 
philosophy into the Christian faith, and he tried to recon- 
cile the two. He defended Christianity with a breadth of 
view and catholicity of temper far different from such 
apologists as Tertullian and Arnobius. He was hardly a 
systematic thinker, and he came before the era of formu- 
lated doctrine in the great councils. But he seized the 
great idea of the unity of Truth, and t*he consequent unity 
of History. He taught that " philosophy was for the 
Greeks what the Law was for the tiews," — a schoolmaster 
leading to Christ. If he did not anticipate the science of 
comparative religion, which belongs only to our late time, 
he had at least caught the conception of some harmony 
1 Bigg, Christian Platonists, 47. 



ALEXANDRIA. 63 

between philosophy and faith, of some mutual relationship 
between the efforts of humanity after a religion, and that 
truth which had now come down out of heaven in the per- 
son of Jesus Christ. " Thus it was Clement," says Nean- 
der, " from whom first proceeded the idea of a scientific 
conception of history having its ground in Christianity." ^ 
Says Canon Westcott : " He affirmed once for all, upon 
the threshold of the new age, that Christianity is the heir 
of all past time, and the interpreter of the future. Six- 
teen centuries have confirmed the truth of his principle, and 
left its application still fruitful." ^ His maxim was, "■ No 
faith without knowledge, no knowledge without faith," and 
so he was what De Pressense calls an " Evangelical Gnos- 
tic." Unsystematic, aphoristic thinker as he was, having 
so many foreign elements in his education, possibly some 
of them in his belief, and with such a liberal principle to 
control his thought, it is hardly strange that narrower if 
more orthodox minds condemned his views, and that he 
started an opposition to his school whose mightiest anath- 
ema descended upon Origen, his illustrious successor, and 
which could not recognize the immortal service the two 
men were rendering in the development of Christian truth. 
As Clement came from philosophy into faith, on the 
other side Origen went through faith to philosophy. He 
was an Egyptian, Coptic not Grecian, born of Christian 
parents, though deriving his name from one of his country's 
deities, born in Alexandria in the year 185 A. D. Later he 
received the surname Adamantius, for there was a certain 
iron firmness and persistency in the man. His father died 
a martyr in 202 A. D., and at about the same time Origen, 
being but eighteen years old, was put at the head of the 
school which Clement had left, and which in the spirit of 
his master he sustained for twenty-eight years. At the 
end of that time he was ordained a presbyter, and thus 

^ Church History, i. 539. 

2 Dictionary of Christian Biography, art. " Clement." 



64 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

incurred the resentment of his former friend, Demetrius, 
the Bishop of Alexandria. This drove him to Csesarea, 
where he opened a new school. At last he was recalled 
to his former home. In the Decian persecution he was 
imprisoned, tortured, condemned to the stake. He re- 
gained his liberty, but enfeebled b}^ his sufferings he died 
some time after at Tyre, when sixty-nine years old. 

Origen was a man of intense nature. He gave him- 
self with inextinguishable ardor to the new religion. He 
studied philosophy that he might better defend it ; but he 
held it, not with the tranquil conviction of a philosopher, 
but with the earnestness of faith. He suffered for it 
while alive, and his name has alternated between honor 
and reproach ever since. He doomed himself to suffer- 
ing, for he almost courted martyrdom ; subjected himself 
to the most ascetic discipline, even to self -mutilation ; and 
the works he has left show his consuming industry. His 
studies cover a wide range, and his activity was unceasing. 
He was the most prolific author of the ancient Church, his 
works numbering 6,000, according to what seems an ex- 
travagant estimate. He studied the Scriptures in the 
Hebrew as well as the Greek, and was the father of criti- 
cal interpretation, though much given to allegorizing. 
Their facts he made the vehicle of ideas, and chiefly valu- 
able for that purpose. He was the mightiest of apologists, 
encountering Celsus not only with keen intellectual weap- 
ons, but with the courage and moral earnestness of con- 
fident belief. The time had not yet come for the great 
Councils, and their more definite and elaborate creeds. 
But he marked out the lines on which the dogmatic state- 
ment of Christian truth was to proceed. Says Professor 
Harnack : " This is just where his epoch-making impor- 
tance lies, that all the later parties in the Church learned 
of him. And this is true not only of the dogmatic par- 
ties ; solitary monks and ambitious priests, hard-headed 
critical exegetes, allegorists, mystics, all found something 



ALEXANDRIA. 65 

congenial in his writings." ^ Both Orthodox and Arian 
appealed to his teaching, and appealing to isolated pas- 
sages found plausible support. His philosophy led him 
into fanciful opinions which have not passed the audit of 
time. He had been under the instruction of Ammonius, 
the first of the Neo-Platonists, and in trying to reconcile 
Christianity with reason, and to commend it to unbelief, 
he ran into fascinating but false speculations. His rul- 
ing theological idea is the immutability of God. This re- 
quires the eternity of the Logos and of the world, and led 
to the doctrines of eternal generation and eternal creation. 
From this, and from the nature of the soul, he deduced 
the preexistence of souls and their final restoration. His 
doctrine of the Eternal Word led to a depreciation of his- 
torical Christianity, and to his idea of an exoteric and eso- 
teric form of it. Indeed, Arianism found in it a support 
for the inferiority of Christ, as the Athanasian appealed 
to it as involving the orthodox doctrine. Dr. Schaff calls 
him " in many respects the Schleiermacher of the Greek 
Church." It has been his fortune to be much discredited, 
more so, perhaps, than any of the ancient fathers. His 
genius, his philosophical education, the influence of Neo- 
Platonic and Gnostic opinions, the wide range of his spec- 
ulative inquiries, the very atmosphere of Alexandria at 
the beginning of the third century, the as yet unformed 
and unfixed lines of doctrinal debate, and the subsequent 
autocratic power of orthodoxy account for the double for- 
tune of blessing and cursing which he has inherited. If 
he is not judged by the limitations, indeed by the exorbi- 
tances of his time, as well as by the standard of eternal 
truth, he will receive undeserved dishonor. And over 
against his idealizing tendency must be set the earnestness 
of his faith. He took a broad view, and often flew high 
in the air ; but he did not lose his footing in the solid rev- 
elation of Christ. The alien things he brought into his 
^ Encyc. Brit., xvii. 842. 



66 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

system did not exclude the Eternal Word to which he had 
given his faith. Says De Pressense : " Realizing all that 
he teaches, carrying into his speculations the fire of an 
ardent conviction, ambitious of knowledge, not through 
pride, but through genuine love of truth, he unites the 
breadth of a great mind to the austerity of an ascetic life. 
He shows himself ready to seal his faith by an ignomini- 
ous death, no less than to suffer for it the painful persecu- 
tion inflicted on him within the Churcli by sectarian nar- 
rowness; and under his double martyrdom he remains 
invariably faithful to the truth which has taken full pos- 
session of his soul." ^ 

This was the beginning of Christianity in Alexandria, 
and of its being cast into its cosmopolitan, fermenting 
thought. It formed a school, a type of religious thought, 
a method of apologetics, a spirit if not a dogma, needed 
in the development of Christianity, and which to the his- 
torical student, if not to the theologian, has great value. 
Other developments came, as different as the West from 
the East, Augustine from Origen, the Roman and the 
Greek mind. But Alexandrian Christianity did its work, 
a work for its own time, possibly for all time. Its work 
was to meet inquiring, even reforming and philosophic 
Paganism, and justify itself as the true, the divine, and 
universal religion. And it puts itself in the true apolo- 
getic attitude, recognizing truth wherever found, and do- 
ing justice to it. It was a difficult, even dangerous posi- 
tion. It could not always sever between the truth and 
the false mixture in which it was held. To combat Gnos- 
ticism, and not underrate the power of evil and the guilt 
of sin; to maintain belief in a God not double, and yet 
not identical with the world ; to study the Bible, and yet 
not cast out the Gentile philosophy ; to assert the culture 
of the Greek and not deny the faith of the Christian, — 
was the difficult task of Alexandrian Christianity. It made 
1 Early Years, ii. 333. 



ALEXANDRIA. 67 

mistakes. It went over tlie edge to which its idealizing 
and speculative tendency brought it. In its breadth, it 
covered doctrines not revealed, and involved itself in 
speculations which have not been able to establish them- 
selves in Christian faith. It had larger freedom, and so 
was tempted to roam farther afield before the great coun- 
cils had declared their authoritative decisions. The Greek 
theology was not the Latin. It took a wider range ; it 
gave larger freedom to the will ; it indulged a larger 
hope for mankind in the world to come ; it was more 
hospitable to foreign truth than the doctors and creeds 
of the West would allow. It was ideal and speculative 
as against the more rigid and practical tendency of the 
Western Church. And then Clement and Origen were to 
all intents laymen, and encouraged no sacerdotalism, no 
sacramentarianism. Origen was driven from Alexandria 
under the pretext of heresy, but really because he had 
provoked the jealousy of his ecclesiastical superior in 
taking ordination as a presbyter. It was written in the 
decrees of Providence, — it might be said, in the forces, 
political as well as spiritual, which were shaping Chris- 
tian history, — that Augustine, rather than Clement and 
Origen, should rule in the theology of the centuries to 
come. If the Greek theology rather than the Latin had 
prevailed, if the free spirit and thought of Alexandria had 
gone on to take possession of the future, the history of 
the Church would have been very different, whether better 
or worse we are not infallible enough to say. Only one 
sees in the Christian thought of to-day very much which 
affiliates with the Alexandrian school, if it has not origi- 
nated in any restoration of it. Certain types of life re- 
peat themselves, and so with types of thought. The ideas 
which flowered in Alexandrianism are not dead, and take 
their turn in the alternations of human opinion. The 
same problems bring similar solutions. There is the 
same conflict with philosophy, and the same attempts at 



68 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

reconciliation. Men struggle now as then, and perhaps 
still more, to harmonize the revelation of God in nature 
and in Jesus. A missionary era brings together the ethnic 
religions into comparison with Christianity, as in that 
first age when all creeds met in Alexandria, and unfolds 
more clearly the idea of a universal religion. There is 
the same tendency to expand the mercy of God, and the 
possibility of Christian redemption. The humane sympa- 
thies born of the Gospel reach out after a theodicy which 
will relieve the mystery of eternal evil. There is a re- 
turn to the doctrine of divine immanence, and a reaction 
against the determinism which, whether theological or 
scientific, cannot hold unbroken dominion. And in gen- 
eral there is a tendency, an aspiration toward spiritual 
rather than dogmatic unity, which leads to a recognition 
of the many-sidedness of truth, and to a more catholic 
comprehensiveness. Whether it be a sign of health or 
disease, of a more or a less spiritual Christianity, it is to 
be noted as an historical fact. 

Three quarters of a century after the death of Origen 
arises the next great figure in the Alexandrian history. 
This is the illustrious prelate Athanasius. Marked for 
his high office in his boyhood, and coming to it when but 
thirty years old, he held the patriarchate for over forty- 
six years. Five times, and for twenty out of these forty- 
six years, he was in exile. He lived to be seventy-six 
years old. He went to the Council of Nicea as an arch- 
deacon, in attendance on the bishop Alexander, whom he 
succeeded in office but five months later. His greatness 
was in his soul. Julian the Emperor sneered at his di- 
minutive stature, while Gregory Nazianzen compared his 
face to an angel's. With his stooping figure, his hooked 
nose, his ample whiskers, and cropped beard and auburn 
hair, and keen eyes, we can picture to our imagination 
Athanasius the Great, as he came not long after to be 
called. Great in his acuteness, in his theological position, 



ALEXANDRIA. 69 

in his force of will, it was his time and place, the exact 
exigency he met, which gave him historic greatness. He 
was put into the midst of a great battle, where it seemed 
to fall to him as much as to anybody in the world to de- 
cide what the destiny of Christendom was to be. For this 
he was a general, a leader, a resolute fighter in a conflict 
not only with imperial authority, but with the Church 
itself. The question in controversy really was, whether 
Christianity should go back into Jewish deism on one 
side, or into polytheism on the other ; whether the Incar- 
nation was real with a real God in it ; whether Christ the 
eternal Son was of a different essence from the Father, 
or of similar essence, or of the same essence. And the 
victory was not more for the Council which decided for 
the reality of the Incarnation, and the perfect divinity of 
Christ, than with the little archdeacon who was hardly a 
member of it, but who against emperors and bishops 
fought that the decision of the Council should stand. 
The victory came, not from the pontiff at Rome, but from 
the Alexandrian bishop, " Athanasius against the world." 
On the spiritual field he decided, what Clovis and his 
Franks decided with their swords at the end of the fifth 
century, that the Church should be Catholic and not 
Arian, that Christendom should not fall into Islamism, 
that Christianity should rest on the real Incarnation of 
God. Whatever we may think of the importance of the 
controversy or of its result, whether to our view it nar- 
rows itself to a question of a letter in a Greek word, or 
extends to the very foundations of Christianity and its 
existence and final victory in the world, we cannot fail to 
be impressed by the unconquerable courage, the ubiqui- 
tous activity, of Athanasius. Other and gentler qualities, 
if we may believe the testimony of his contemporaries, — 
humor, sensitiveness, affectionateness, discretion, and deep 
religiousness, — were mixed with his firmness. There was 
something in him which won the cynical eulogium of a 



70 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

sceptic like Gibbon ; it inspired the fervid and weighty 
eloquence of Hooker. The great Churchman is struck, 
as everybody must be, by his undiscouraged fortitude 
when he stood alone, and all the world went against him. 
For during his episcopate the doctrine of the Arians be- 
came the religion of the imperial government and of the 
Church. " Only of Athanasius," he says, " there was 
nothing observed, through that long tragedy, other than 
such as very well became a wise man to do, and a right- 
eous man to suffer. So that this was the plain condition 
of those times, the whole world against Athanasius, and 
Athanasius against it. Half a hundred years spent in 
doubtful trial which of the two in the end would prevail, 
— the side which had all, or else the part which had no 
friend but God and death ; the one a defender of his in- 
nocency, the other a finisher of his troubles." 

After the failure of Julian to restore Paganism, the 
emperors had with increasing zeal undertaken its suppres- 
sion. They were not satisfied to let it crumble and fall 
with its own emptiness, to melt in the warmer climate 
Christianity was making. It was not according to the 
ideas of a blunt and vigorous Spanish soldier like Theo- 
dosius to accomplish results in that way. To a Roman 
emperor of that time, the readiest way to destroy a bad 
religion, or promote a true one, was by force. He was 
determined to consolidate the power of the new religion, 
and he began by measures for extinguishing Paganism. 
Its revenues were alienated, its sacrifices were forbidden, 
and now destruction menaced the temples. Libanius 
pleaded for them as works of art, if they could not be 
spared as the shrines of religion. But their doom was 
fixed. They were falling everywhere. East and West. 
But the great Temple of Jupiter remained at Rome, and 
that of Serapis at Alexandria. The Serapeum dated 
from the founding of the city, being built by the first of 
the Ptolemies. It was placed on an artificial hill, with 



ALEXANDRIA. 71 

an ascent of a hundred steps. The temple was in an 
interior square, with a magnificent portico on all sides, 
while round the whole were the dwellings of the priests. 
The statue of the god was colossal, made of a fusion of 
all metals, polished to one color, and inlaid with precious 
stones. The rescript of Theodosius for its destruction 
came in 391, and was provoked by a feud and a collision, 
such as easily came in the midst of a turbulent population 
divided into fanatical parties. Theophilus was bishop, a 
bold, unscrupulous man, ready enough to inflame the pas- 
sions of the mob against the Pagans. Conflict arose un- 
der his instigation, blood was shed, and occasion was given 
for imperial interference. Theodosius coupled his grant 
of pardon to the offenders with an order for the destruc- 
tion of all the idolatrous temples. Theophilus, with the 
prefect of the city at the head of the military, proceeded to 
execute the order. The heathen, and even the Christians, 
were filled with a vague terror at what might happen if the 
statue of the god were injured. But at last a Christian 
soldier clove the vast cheek of the image with his axe, 
with none of the dreaded results. Awe turned into 
mirth, the idol was broken into pieces, and the temple 
demolished. It was the same Theophilus who used the 
low deception of ]3acifying the monks of the Thebaid by 
condemning the doctrines of Origen, while he himself 
held that very tenet of the Alexandrian father which was 
most odious to them, the spirituality of God. It was the 
same Theophilus who engaged in miserable intrigues 
against Chrysostom, and went to Constantinople to 
bring about his exile. His nephew, Cyril, succeeded 
him in 412, and promised to be like him. He had the 
same intemperate zeal, and inherited the same bad name 
for violence and craft. He at once fell into a quarrel 
with the prefect of the city, having stirred up bloody 
strife between the Christians and the Jews. And the 
sequel was the awful tragedy which Mr. Kingsley has 



72 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

made familiar in his historical novel, "Hypatia," and 
George Ebers in " Serapis." For that was the name of 
a beautiful and accomplished woman, a mathematician 
and philosopher, who had come to be recognized as the 
head of the Neo-Platonic School. She was the friend 
and counsellor of the prefect, Orestes, and this excited 
the jealousy and hatred of the fanatical mob, and of the 
Nitrian monks, who, under the lead of Peter, a reader 
in the Church, dragged her from her chariot into one of 
the churches, stripped her, tore her piecemeal, burned her 
remains, and cast the ashes, into the sea. Theodoret, a 
score of years after, charged upon Cyril complicity with 
this barbarous murder, but most historians are unwilling 
to believe it. 

Little remains of the Christian history of Alexandria 
that is worth relating. It is a story of quarrels and in- 
trigues, of Nestorians, Eutychians, Monophysites, of her- 
esy pursuing heresy, of the same metaphysical discussions, 
and no Origen or Athanasius, even no Theophilus or 
Cyril, to engage in them ; of the Church given up to the 
rule of Monophysite Patriarchs ; of the city of the Ptol- 
emies and the Caesars getting ready for another master. 
For before the middle of the seventh century Amron and 
his Saracens were coming with their conquering sabres. 
The Emperor at Constantinople sent no succor. The 
Copts were not unwilling to be rid of the Greeks. And 
so before Mohammed had been dead ten years the city of 
St. Mark acknowledged the Caliph Omar as its sovereign, 
and the crescent took the place of the cross. The victo- 
rious general wrote to the caliph : " I have taken the 
great city of the West. It is impossible for me to enu- 
merate the variety of its riches and beauty ; I shall con- 
tent myself with observing that it contains 4,000 palaces, 
4,000 baths, 400 theatres, or places of amusement, 12,000 
shops for the sale of vegetable food, and 40,000 tributary 
Jews. The town has been subdued by force of arms, 



ALEXANDRIA. 73 

without treaty or capitulation, and the Moslems are im- 
patient to seize the fruits of their victory." ^ 

At the end of the thirteenth century Abulpharagius, 
a Jacobite archbishop in Asia Minor (Aleppo), told this 
story about the Alexandrian library : John the Gramma- 
rian, surnamed Philoponus, a peripatetic philospher, being 
in Alexandria at the time of its capture, and in high 
favor with Amron, begged that he would give him the 
royal library. Amron told him it was not in his power to 
grant such a request, but promised to write to the caliph 
for his consent. Omar, on learning the request of his 
general, is said to have replied that, if these books con- 
tained the same doctrine with the Koran, they could be 
of no use, since the Koran contained all necessary truths ; 
but if they contained anything contrary to that book, they 
ought to be destroyed, and therefore, whatever their con- 
tents were, he ordered them to be burnt. Pursuant to this 
order they were distributed among the public baths, of 
which there was a large number in the city, where for 
six months they served to supply the fire. It hardly re- 
quires the scepticism of Gibbon to doubt the story. The 
great library of the Ptolemies had met many mis- 
chances by fire long before, and must have been much re- 
duced ; the story is told nearly six hundred years after 
the event as a wonder, by a stranger far away in Arme- 
nia, while the Alexandrian writers of the time are silent 
about it. And it may be allowed to doubt whether any- 
thing was burned up in the library which was any great 
loss to after times. Books that deserve to live manage 
somehow to live. It is the good, the true, the immortal 
books which do not shrink to single copies, which the 
world will not willingly let die. And as the sneering 
Gibbon says : " If the ponderous mass of Arian and 
Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in the 
^ Gibbon, ch. ii. p. 955. 



74 CITIKS OF OUR FAITH. 

public batlis, a philosoplier may allow, with a smile, that 
it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of mankind." ^ 

It is nearly a thousand years from Alexander to Am- 
ron, and all the glory of Alexandria was in those thou- 
sand years. Vasco da Gama found a new way to the 
Indies round the Cape of Storms. Venice not only stole 
the remains and the patron ship of St. Mark, but captured 
the commerce of the Levant. The Church divided, and 
its life and splendor were in the West rather than the 
East. If any glory was left in Syria or Egypt, in Con- 
stantinople or Alexandria, the Moslem soon defaced it. 
The intellectual eminence of Alexandria waned long be- 
fore its commercial decline ; and all the power it has 
left is in her names in philosophy and theology, — 

" the dead but sceptred sovereigns who still rule 
Our spirits from their urns." 

In the metropolis of that New World beyond Atlantis, of 
which Ptolemy, the great geographer of Alexandria, never 
dreamed, stands the obelisk which Tiberius Caesar brought 
from Heliopolis, and set up in one of its squares, type of 
the oldest civilization tardily following after the course of 
empire which westward takes its way. So goes the his- 
tory of the world, never in one stay. Its art sets up pil- 
lars of stone, its theology sets up pillars of dogma. But 
time comes, which is greater than everything but truth, 
and makes the new old, and even the old new again. 

" O backward-looking son of time, 
The new is old, the old is new, 
The cycle of a change sublime 
Still sweeping through. 

" But life shall on and upward go ; 
The eternal step of Progress beats 
To that great anthem calm and clear 
Which God repeats. 

^ Gibbon, ch. ii. p. 956. 



ALEXANDRIA. 75 

Take heart ! the Waster builds again, 
A charmed life old Goodness hath ; 
The tares may perish, but the grain 
Is not for death. 

' God works in all things ; all obey 

His first propulsion from the night ; 
Wake thou and watch ! the world is gray 
With morning light." 



III. EOME. 

When Jesus Christ was born, Rome was seven hundred 
and fifty-three years old. In that time it had grown from 
a little village on the Palatine into a great city with two 
millions of people, in fact into the great city of the world. 
More than that, by its genius for political organization, it 
had first made all Italy part of itself, and then made the 
whole Mediterranean basin subject to its rule ; and before 
long its provinces stretched from the Euphrates to the 
Atlantic, and from the Danube to the Numidian desert. 
It had become an Empire, and the Master of the World. 
It was not yet all it became as a city. Many of the great 
buildings whose ruins still draw the world to the sight had 
not yet arisen. But it had organized a system of law 
which has lasted longer than its most solid structures. It 
had created a literature only second to that of Greece, 
and which already was in the splendor of its noon. The 
wealth of conquest was coming to give it new magnifi- 
cence. The Republic was past, and the emperors were to 
enrich it with forums, basilicas, temples, and amphithea- 
tres, with triumphal arches and columns, with aqueducts 
and baths, and to replace brick with marble. It was a 
collumes gentium.. The old Latin and Sabine farmers 
and traders who lived on its hills would not have felt at 
home with such a mixed crowd of Egyptians and Moors, 
of Greeks and Asiatics, of Jews, Italians, Iberians, and 
Gauls, as made its mixed population eight centuries later. 
At the centre of the Forum, Augustus set a gilded mile- 
stone, from which went out thirty-one roads to the ends of 
the Empire. These highways opened the world to Rome 
for coming and going. The traveller could pass with ease 
from Cadiz to Byzantium, from Cologne to the cataracts 



ROME. 77 

of the Nile. Over these roads the legions went out to pro- 
tect the boundaries, and traffic came to bring all luxuries 
to the capital. Everything and everybody came to Rome, 
— Greek artists and rhetoricians, Alexandrian corn-mer- 
chants, African lion-hunters, Jewish pedlers, captives by 
thousands to crown a general's triumph, gladiators butch- 
ered " to make a Roman holiday," curious travellers to see 
the wonders and enjoy the pleasures of such a city ; here 
a prisoner like Paul, here a messenger like Phoebe carry- 
ing his Epistle ; from east and west, from north and south, 
all sorts of people came to bring something or find some- 
thing in this metropolis of all the nations. The first fam- 
ilies, the optimates^ made themselves rich by foreign plun- 
der ; but most of the people were poor, and a million of 
them slaves, with from six hundred to a thousand sena- 
tors,^ ten thousand knights, fifteen thousand soldiers ; the 
rest were " people," the plehs urhana^ a great proletariat, 
prolific of social danger, and supported at public expense. 
Of Rome in the making, little is to be said here. There 
had been a monarchy and a republic, with whatever cloud 
of myth over its beginnings and early history. The le- 
gends may pass with whatever kernel of truth was in them. 
There were patricians and plebeians ; there were Gaulish 
invasions and Samnite and Punic wars ; there were the 
struggles of the people with the aristocracy, with victory 
and assassination to Caesar, the leader of democracy, and 
the founder of the Empire at last. Enough that Rome 
began and grew, and at last, as the result of these seven 
centuries and more, there is a compact life here, a solid 
city, the city of cities, with wealth, with government, with 
religion, with the pride of a great history, with the power 
of a great Empire, with the glory of unconquerable arms. 
Enough that here is a mighty imperialism beginning the 
experiment of new centuries of dominion. Enough, above 
all, that here is a great Rome already made, waiting for a 
1 Merivale says five hundred. History of Romans^ i. 62. 



78 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

new religion, worth receiving, worth propagating far as its 
roads or arms could go. Enough that here at the centre 
of civilization, the new history of the world, with its feeble 
beginnings at Jerusalem, is to take foothold, and start for 
another empire, of wider reach and deeper foundations 
than that of the Caesars. 

The Caesars were the chief pontiffs of the religion which 
had been inherited from Rome's earlier days. It was a 
plain, homely faith, of exact, regulated, almost military 
ceremonial, with the dry, prosaic character of the primitive 
Romans. It was without enthusiasm, and took its inspi- 
ration from political feeling, for it was the creature of the 
state, without doctrine, or even a code of morals. There 
was no emotion, no kindling vision, no satisfaction for the 
heart. It had not even the airy grace and charm of the 
Greek mythology. It was dry, legal, an obligation to be 
punctually met in order to secure the protection of the 
gods. It was commercial, so much ceremony and so much 
favor in return. It made the father of the family su- 
preme, and gave much ceremonial sanction to marriage, 
and was a support to the magistracy. It may have pro- 
duced heroes, never saints. It was selfish rather than in- 
spiring ; civic rather than spiritual, or even mythologic ; 
the religion of patriotism rather than of faith, or even of 
ethics. The pontiffs were civil officers, not an unworldly 
clergy. Says Cicero : " Our ancestors were never wiser, 
never more inspired of the gods, than when they deter- 
mined that the same persons should preside over the rites 
and ceremonies of religion and the government of the 
state." ^ In the course of time it had received foreign 
elements, which, however, had not radically changed its 
character. " The gloomy faith of the Etruscans, the gen- 
ial mythology of the Greeks, the fanatical mysticism of 
Asia, all left their mark on the liberal religion of the 
conquering Republic, always ready to tolerate and find 
1 Uhlhorn, Conflict of Christianity and Heathenism, p. 34. 



ROMK. 79 

room for the various gods of the nations whom the sword 
of the legions had ejected from their homes. But so long 
as the capitol remained the centre of Roman religion, and 
Romans were Romans by blood and not by ado2)tion, the 
foundations of the national religion continued firm, and 
withstood the assaults of foreiqn divinities." ^ There were 
divinities enough for everything, for every part of nature 
and every event of life. There were indigitamenta^ or 
registers, with lists of gods for all human wants, so that no 
one need be deceived.^ There were forty-three gods for 
childhood, from the infant's first cry through all his eat- 
ing and drinking, and sports and studies. There were 
gods for war and agriculture, for marriage and maternity, 
for trade and the chase ; gods of the sky and the seasons, 
of the sea and the gardens, of the household and the state, 
of beginnings and boundaries, even of thieves and drains. 
The words of the frivolous Petronius were more than a 
joke, that " this country is so peopled with divinities that 
it is easier to meet a god than a man." If there was any 
supreme deit}^, it was Rome itself. The Jupiter of the 
Capitol represented the state ; and when the Empire came 
the Emperors themselves became gods, receiving divine 
honors. This was the strength of their religion, and the 
chief virtue it produced. The Roman felt that he be- 
longed, not to himself, but his country. Religion took 
the form of patriotism, and when that declined with the 
expansion of the Empire, and the opening of Rome to alien 
influences, barren ritualism or puerile superstition took its 
place. Attempts were made to arrest the decadence, but 
at the end of the Republican period Rome was full of in- 
difference or scepticism.^ Foreign religions came, but the 
new gods gave no more satisfaction to restless hearts than 
the old ones, and only scepticism was left. Wealth, lux- 

^ W. R. Inge, Society in Rome under the Caesars, p. 5. 

2 Boissier, La Religion Ptomaine, i. 4. 

3 iiid^^ i, 54_53^ 



80 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

ury, slavery, weakened public and private morals, and 
among the cultivated class there was a pretty thorough 
unbelief in the old religion, if not in any religion at all. 
They wanted religion sustained for the sake of the people, 
and for social convenience. And so Augustus revived an 
outward interest in its ceremonies. The restoration of 
the national religion was a leading idea in his policy. But 
it was for a political purpose, and not from any sincerity 
of faith in the gods, whom he privately scoffed. And so 
it only hastened the decomposition of the old religion, 
which, when it issued in the apotheosis of the Emperor, who 
might be a buffoon, a madman, or a monster, had little 
reality or moral power left. " It is easy to forecast the 
future of a religious restoration like this, which was but a 
gigantic political fraud." ^ 

The advent of Oriental religions in Rome is a most 
significant phenomenon. It showed the effect of a poly- 
theistic education. It showed that the primitive faith of 
Rome had decayed, and failed to satisfy men's minds. 
This passion for remote, strange, novel, mysterious dei- 
ties, as different as possible from their own, was the sign 
of an exhausted faith, of a feverish despair, possibly of a 
hope still reaching after something better to believe. Isis, 
Serapis, Mithras, the gods of Egypt, of Syria, of Persia, 
became the fashion. They had their sanctuaries. Their 
worship touched a new chord in men's bosoms. And they 
set men looking towards the East, where the sun of a 
holier faith was rising, and the knowledge of an Eternal 
God through Jesus Christ was starting westward to take 
possession of Rome at last, and sweep all its mythologies 
away. 

For the Jew among the rest had come to Rome with 

his Jehovah. It was a part of the dispersion of the Jews 

in all countries. And it was a part of the inevitable 

gravitation of all vagrant people towards Rome. They 

^ Dr. Pressensd, The Ancient World and Christianity , p. 424. 



ROME. 81 

came to stay, perhaps sixty years before the Christian era, 
and multiplied rapidly.^ They settled themselves in the 
dirtiest and poorest part of the city, beyond the Tiber. 
They lent themselves to mean employments, and were 
fond of gain, as they have been ever since. Still they 
had something better about them which excited curiosity 
as well as disdain. They were hated because they hated 
in turn. They were proud even in their beggary. But 
scorn as they were of the satirist, they had something in 
their history and their religion to draw respect. They 
were Jews always, and never changed their ancestral 
faith. Amidst their poverty and their dirt they had their 
Sabbaths and synagogues,^ and kept intercourse with the 
synagogues in Jerusalem. They won proselytes there as 
elsewhere. But they made small impression on the life 
around them. Judaism was not the religion for such a 
society. It could not take the place of the old. It had 
not truth and power and life enough to create the new." 
They were not to find a New Jerusalem on the banks 
of the Tiber. 

But the new came, — when, where, how, is unwritten. 
Christianity struck Rome near the middle of the first cen- 
tury, but through what persons, in what way, with what 
exact impression, we can only infer, for there is no record. 
There were Christian disciples there, Jewish and Gentile, 
before any apostle came. It has been much disputed 
whether Peter ever came at all. He was not there, cer- 
tainly, and had not been there, when Paul wrote his pow- 
erful Epistle to the Church in Rome, or he could hardly 
have escaped allusion in the midst of so many less known 
and unimportant names. Indeed, on Paul's avowed prin- 

^ " In Rome under Augustus the Jews numbered perhaps 40,000 ; 
in the time of Tiberias, perhaps 80,000." Uhlhorn, Conflict of Chris- 
tianity and Heathenism. 

2 " The existence of seven synagogues in Rome has been definitely 
established, and probably there were others." Uhlhorn, 83. 
6 



82 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

ciple of not building on another man's foundations, he 
could not have written the Epistle at all if Peter were 
there before. At last Paul himself arrived in Rome, and 
ji, is incredible that everybody came to hear what the 
famous apostle had to say for himself, and Peter stayed 
away. He lived in Rome two years, and in that time he 
sent letters, still preserved, to Timothy and Philemon, 
and to at least three churches, in neither of which is there 
the remotest allusion to the other apostle. And it is only 
after more than a hundred years of silence in regard to 
Peter that a tradition appears of his having been Bishop 
of Pome for twenty-five years, and that he there, like 
Paul, met his martyrdom. This tradition was promoted 
by the Clementine romance, which was designed to mag- 
nify Peter in order to establish the growing eminence and 
authority of the Roman Bishop. It is more than doubt- 
ful, however, whether he ever came to Rome at all. If 
he did, it must have been at a late period of his life.^ 

No doubt Christianity had been known at the capital, 
more or less, since the return of the " strangers of Rome " 
from the Pentecost.^ Among the many thousands of 
Jews, there must have been some who had heard of it 
through correspondence with friends at home and visits, 
and probably some who had embraced it, either before, 
or more certainly after, their expulsion by the Emperor 
Claudius in the latter part of his reign. Two of these 
refugees, Aquila and Priscilla, whether converted before 
or after, returned there and had a " Church in their house." 
Two of the persons named in Paul's Epistle were his rel- 
atives, converted before he was, well known to the other 
apostles, who had probably carried their faith to Rome 
some time before.^ At all events, in the year 58 there 

1 A. Harnack, Encyc. Brit, xviii., art. " Peter." 

2 Acts ii. 10. 

8 That the last chapter of the Epistle was designed for the Church 
ill Rome is in debate. The arguments are concisely stated by Farrar, 
The Messages of the Books, p. 290. 



ROME. 83 

was a Church there, perhaps not so thoroughly organized 
as afterwards, but important enough for Paul to write to 
it his most labored Epistle, in which twenty-four of its 
members are mentioned by name. Some of these persons 
were Jews, though the names are all Greek, while the 
argument implies the presence of both Jews and Gentiles, 
divided in views and sympathies, perhaps into different 
congregations, and the liberal party, which Paul repre- 
sented, apparently in the majority. It was a Greek 
rather than a Latin Church, strange as it may seem, re- 
cruited out of the energetic, intelligent, inquisitive Greek 
population of the city,^ and justifying St. Paul's assertion 
that the Gospel was the power of God " to the Jew first, 
and also to the Greek." Of course such a body was lost, 
almost unknown, in the vast mass of a heathen popula- 
tion. By the large Jewish community it was generally 
ignored or despised, and their leaders told the apostle, 
when he came, that everywhere his "sect" had a bad 
name, and they abjured it and him. 

It must have been in about the year 61 that Paul ar- 
rived in the city, brought by compulsion of law, and yet 
quite in agreement with a desire and plan of his own. 
Some time before he had said, " I must see Rome," and 
not for the sake of the city only, but of the Church, which 
he " longed " with " great desire " to visit. He had lived 
and preached in later years in the larger cities of the Em- 
pire, — Philippi, Ephesus, Athens, Corinth, — and Rome 
was left to the end of his career. He came a prisoner, 
and yet his moulding power in a growing Church could 

1 E. Schiirer on Ep. to Romans, Ency. Brit, xx. 

This is now the opinion of most historical students. " For some 
considerable (it cannot but be indefinable) part of the three first cen- 
turies the Church of Rome, and most if not all the churches of the 
West, were, if we may so speak, Greek religious colonies. Their 
language was Greek, their organization Greek, their writers Greek, 
their Scriptures Greek." Milman, Latin Christianity, ch. i. p. 32 
Cf. Lightfoot, Philippinns, p. 19. 



84 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

not be small, and must have been in the line of his re- 
markble Epistle. He encountered factious opposition, the 
same he had met elsewhere, and yet, as he wrote to Phi- 
lippi,! that made Christ better known. He was bound to 
a soldier, so that he had no free circulation in the city, if 
he desired to see it, or be known in it. But he "dwelt 
two whole years in his own hired house, and received all 
that came in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God." ^ 
And such stationary preaching was not without fruit. 
His chain testified of the cause for which he wore it to 
all the soldiers of the imperial guard, who in succession 
kept daily watch over him.^ His converts were among 
the imperial household, and were numerous enough to send 
salutations in a body to a distant church.* 

But a veil of uncertainty, and then of darkness falls 
upon Paul while here at Eome. Here the end came, 
probably after trial, and by the lictor's axe ; but whether 
at the end of the two years' residence, or after going east 
again, and then to Spain, and a second imprisonment and 
trial, is still a question, and perhaps always will be. He 
disappears, and our last glimpse of him is in Rome. He 
disappears, let us hope, under the doom of Nero's court, 
and not in the flame of Nero's wrath. He disappears, a 
victim somehow to that power with which, for two centu- 
ries and a half, Christianity was to struggle through 
sufferings like his own even to victory at last. He may 
have died under sentence of the Roman judges, and been 
spared the more dreadful fate of his brethren in the 
Roman Church, which came soon, not in the course of 
law, but in the outburst of fierce and bloody passion.^ 

On the 16th of July, in the year 64, in the night, a 
wild conflagration broke out in the city of Rome. For 

1 Philippians i. 15-18. 2 Acts xxviii. 30. 

3 Philippians i. 13, * Lightfoot, Philippians, 169-176. 

5 Farrar, Life of St. Paul, chap. Iv., gives an interesting account, 
hypothetical, of the closing period. 



ROME. 85 

six days and seven nights the fire raged, and then for 
three days more in a new quarter, burning over ten out 
of the fourteen wards of the city, and leaving a large 
part of it a heap of ruins. It was a time of consterna- 
tion and unreasoning fury. The Emperor himself was 
charged with being the incendiary.^ And he, says Taci- 
tus, falsely charged the Christians with the crime. Some 
victim must be found. Some expiation must be made. 
If the Christians could not be convicted of kindling the 
fire, yet, as Tacitus relates, they could be condemned as 
enemies of the human race. Already their religion began 
to be reckoned a detestable superstition, and they were 
counted bad enough to be incendiaries, even though they 
were not guilty of this very deed. And so the old Roman 
appetite for blood was inflamed. And the more cruel the 
death inflicted on the criminals, the more guilty they 
would be made to appear. Perhaps Paul fell under the 
swift, sharp edge of the headsman's axe, and that was 
mercy. For now execution was made a torture. The 
Christians were wrapped in the skins of beasts to be 
hunted and torn in pieces by bloodhounds. At night they 
were wrapped in tow, and smeared with pitch, and bound 
to stakes, and burned as torches. Like Dirce, Chris- 
tian women were bound to a raging bull, and dragged to 
dreadful death. It was all worthy of Nero, who, but 
twenty-six years old, had brutally killed his brother, his 
wife, and his mother, had put to death Seneca and Burrus, 
to whom he was most indebted, and had shown a capacity 
for crime of all kinds such as is rare among the vilest of 
mankind. It was not persecution such as Decius or Dio- 
cletian planned against a dreaded and growing church. 
It was popular rather than legal. It was passion, hatred, 
a bloody thirst, the mad blow of a wild beast, the first 
flash of Pagan wrath against a faith it did not yet under- 
stand, but of which it was suspicious, if not afraid. It 

^ Diet, of Christian Biog., art. " Nero." 



86 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

was limited to Rome. But it showed what was coming 
throughout the Empire. Paganism and Christianity were 
to come into collision, not only through at least ten im- 
perial persecutions, but all along the line of conflict, till 
Constantine should recognize the Church, till Theodosius 
should make pagan worship a crime. 

But something had come into Rome which, though em- 
peror and populace might hate, they could not kill. It 
was a religion which had come to stay, and to live, and to 
grow. The poor had it, but they would not part with it, 
for it was the consolation of their poverty, and the prom- 
ise of their coming inheritance. For years it found no 
record. The satirists found it too insignificant for their 
scorn. The philosophers, whether from ignorance or from 
fear, left it in contemptuous silence. The historians men- 
tion it only to show it was there. Its apostles were dead, 
and Rome appears no more in the New Testament except 
in the lurid sj^mbolism of the Apocalypse. 

At the end of the first century comes Clement, leader 
if not bishop of the Church in Rome, organ at any rate of 
its communication with foreign churches, and author of 
an " Epistle to the Corinthians," sent not so much in his 
own name as in behalf of the Roman congregation. Al- 
ready the idea of a certain honorary primacy in the 
Church of Rome had begun to appear. Its advice was 
asked, was given sometimes without being asked, and the 
Church in Corinth, not much changed since Paul's day, 
needed the counsel of a church in which order and rule 
prevailed, as it did in Rome. It was the authority of the 
Church, however, not of the bishop, which was recognized. 
In fact, the bishop is not mentioned in this letter. The 
growing ascendancy of the Roman Church is seen in the 
controversies which arose in the second and third centu- 
ries respecting the time of observing Easter, the discipline 
of penitents, and the validity of heretical baptism. The 
decision of Rome was sought, and in the end it prevailed. 



ROME. 87 

It was an ancient, an apostolic see, partaking of the po- 
litical preeminence of the capital of the world, eager to 
preserve the orthodoxy and the unity of the Church, and 
slowly acquiring a precedence which had momentous re- 
sults. Its importance and its influence was not in the 
greatness of its bishops. According to the Roman cata- 
logue there were thirty-one popes before the conversion of 
Constantine, or indeed forty-six before Leo the First, and 
hardly one of them is much more than a name on a list, 
and not one who compared with Cyprian, or Ambrose, or 
Augustine, or Athanasius. Jerome singled out one hun- 
dred and thirty-six persons distinguished in the Church 
during the first four centuries, and only four of them 
were bishops of Rome, one for each century, — Clement, 
Victor, Cornelius, and Damasus. And these wrote but 
little. The most learned member of the Roman Church, 
and its leading theologian in the third century, was Hip- 
polytus, whose seated statue one sees in the Lateran Pal- 
ace, and whose important work has been made important 
by its discovery in our own day, and by the light it sheds 
on the Christianity of his time. The third century was 
the period of a great ecclesiastical crisis in Rome, which 
issued in a victory of hierarchical power. It was a ques- 
tion of schism rather than heresy, of discipline rather 
than doctrine, a question between severity and indulgence ; 
and, strange as it may seem, it was the liberal view which 
used its opposite to strengthen and establish episcopal, 
authority. The episcopate had already established its 
preeminence over the eldership. Now it claims the power 
of the keys, the prerogative of remitting sins. And that 
provoked resistance. There came occasion for broader 
remission as the Church grew, and larger numbers brought 
looser morals. First came Montanlsm, austere even to 
rigor, insisting on a strictly pure church, and a stringent 
discipline, with Tertullian, ardent even to fierceness, for 
its prophet. And he arrived in Rome at a critical mo- 



88 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

ment in the struggle, just as the Bishop of Eome was 
taking away from the Church, and conferring on bishops, 
the power to remit sins in virtue of their office. The 
same conflict continued between Hippolytus and Callistus, 
and the result was the same, in the elevation of episcopal 
power and the lowering of discipline. Then came Nova- 
tianism, following on the same lines in support of ancient 
discipline, and an offspring of the Decian persecution. 
For with that came the question, what should be done 
with weak Christians who under its pressure had tempo- 
rarily fallen from the faith. Novatian refused absolution 
even to the penitent, and demanded absolute excommu- 
nication. The other, and, as it proved, stronger party, 
which elected Cornelius bishop, advocated a restorative 
discipline. The contest between rigor and lenity con- 
tinued, but Novatianism lost the battle, and, as Dean Mil- 
man says, " like all unsuccessful opposition, added strength 
to its triumphant adversary. It was not so much by its 
rigor as by its collision with the hierarchical system that it 
lost its hold on the Christian mind." ^ The hierarchical 
idea came out of every conflict with new strength. Power 
was centralized more and more in the clergy than in the 
episcopate, and at last in the Bishop of Rome. 

It is from a letter written by Cornelius, the bishop at 
this time, that we learn something of the growth of the 
Roman Church. He writes that besides the bishop there 
are forty-six presbyters, indicating perhaps the number of 
congregations, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty-two 
acolytes, fifty -two exorcists, readers, and janitors, and 
more than fifteen hundred widows and orphans supported 
by the Church, which led Gibbon to estimate the num- 
ber of Christians in Rome at about fifty thousand.^ The 
catacombs, where its dead were buried, give a knowledge 

1 Latin Christianity, i. 65. A graphic account of the long struggle 
is given by Pressens^, Early Years, iv. b. 1, chaps, v.-vii. 

2 Eusebius, vi. 43 ; Decline and Fall, chap. xv. 



ROME. 89 

of Christianity in Rome for the first three centuries not 
to be found in its literature.^ This silent city under- 
ground was once alive with the terrors, tlie conflicts, the 
griefs, the faith of the new religion which above ground 
was enduring execration and contending for existence. 
It is the monument not so much of human mortality as of 
a new church and religion in Rome. Thither it fled for 
refuge and for consolation, painting the symbols of its 
cheerful faith on the sombre walls, nourishing in its dark 
cells the divine peace and the hopes of immortality which 
Paganism had destroyed. And the testimony was pre- 
served by being buried. It hid itself in the crypts of the 
rock, protected by the Roman laws of burial, to be pro- 
tected afterwards by neglect, till three hundred years ago 
it was unearthed, like another Pompeii, and the Chris- 
tianity of the first three centuries was found as it had 
been left in its subterranean necropolis. Nothing brings 
so near to us the Christians of that early time as these 
innumerable graves, where they laid their dead to rest. 
We walk through these long, dark galleries, and the dust 
takes life again, their immense population returns,^ and 
the early Church in Rome becomes a living reality. It is 
not the voice of her bishops and doctors that we hear, but 
the thoughts, the affections, the faith, the inner life of the 
Christian people are revealed. Into this vast receptacle 
under ground, preserved for ages, all that separated life 
ran, to show what and how great it was. 

On the 28th of October in the year 312, Rome, and 
to some extent the Christians in Rome, must have been 

^ This fact is drawn out in an interesting way in Stanley, Christian 
Institutions, chap. xiii. De Pressens^, Early Years, b. 3, chap. vii. 

2 Martigny, Diet, des^ Antiquites Chretiennes, p. 128, estimates the 
united lengths of the galleries at 587 miles. Northcote thinks there 
were not fewer than 350 miles. Roma Sotteranea, 26. Padre Mar- 
chi makes the extravagant conjecture of six to seven millions of 
graves. 



90 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

greatly agitated by the battles going on at its gates be- 
tween Constantine and Maxentius just beyond the Milvian 
Bridge. It was a contest between two August! for the 
Empire of the West. It really was more. It involved 
deeper and unsuspected issues. Victory for Constantine 
was victory for Christianity. He had already issued 
edicts of toleration. He had had some vision which he 
regarded as a signal that he should espouse the Christian 
cause and conquer by its cross. He was, from conviction 
or policy, or both, going to the Christian side. But he 
had little to do personally with the city of Rome. He 
stayed there two or three months after his victory, and 
erected an arch of triumph, which still stands near the 
Coliseum, bearing his name. Twice afterwards, at inter- 
vals of ten years, he came to the city. Before long he 
built a new capital on the Bosphorus. Rome ceased to be 
the home of the emperors. In the East they kept court 
at Constantinople ; in the West, at Milan or Ravenna. 
And the result of this absence of the emperor in time was 
the augmented importance and influence of the Bishop of 
Rome. Another result also, in time, was two churches, 
with a Greek and a Latin Christianity, and even two em- 
pires. But in name the Empire now ceased to be Pagan. 
The emperors were Christian. A great revolution had 
come. And Rome felt it, though three centuries had not 
been sufficient to secure the exchange of the old religion 
for the new, among the people, and especially among the 
patricians. Now persecution ceased. Toleration made 
the religions equal. Imperial patronage descended on the 
Church. In the year 325 the Emperor summoned the first 
of the seven great councils, and presided over it. There 
is a fable of his baptism in the porphyry font still shown 
in the Lateran, and his donation of the patrimony of St. 
Peter to Pope Sylvester. The possible truth in this me- 
diaeval fiction may be, that he gave the Lateran Palace to 
the Bishop of Rome, where to this day his successors are 



ROME. 91 

throned and crowned. The historic fact is, that when the 
Pope came to rule the States of the Church, it was 
thought necessary to date his title back of Charlemagne, 
as far as the first Christian Emperor, and hence this stu- 
pendous forgery, " which commanded for seven centuries 
the unquestioning belief of mankind." ^ And the actual 
result was, that Constantine, by investing the Church with 
the right of holding land, and receiving it by bequest, 
promoted that gradual accumulation of wealth in the 
hands of the Roman Bishop which secured his power 
better than any premature donation, involving dangerous 
risks and enmities, could have done. The Church grew 
every way, except in spirituality, and with it, if not be- 
yond it, grew the importance and power of the Roman 
Bishop. The Caesars abandoned the ancient capital, and 
rarely visited it. A Prefect, often a Pagan one, ruled in 
the name of the Emperor, with less real power than the 
Bishop, who by the absence of the Emperor and the force 
of events became the first citizen, and his office the prize 
of ecclesiastical, if not of political, ambition. Within 
forty years (357) we find the election to the bishopric 
dividing the city into contending factions, provoking a 
sanguinary conflict which intimidates the government, 
turns the basilicas into contending garrisons, and defiles 
them with blood. The Pagan historian tells the story 
with honesty, if with a slight contempt. " No wonder that, 
for so magnificent a prize as the Bishopric of Rome, men 
should contest with the utmost eagerness and obstinacy. 
To be enriched by the lavish donations of the principal 
females of the city ; to ride splendidly attired in a stately 
chariot ; to sit at a profuse, luxuriant, more than imperial 
table, — these are the rewards of successful ambition." ^ 
More than that, the Bishop of Rome was becoming the 
arbiter in controversy for all the churches, which were 

1 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, 100. 

2 Ammianus Marcellique, xxvii. 3. 



92 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

coming to acknowledge him as the lineal successor of St. 
Peter, and the spiritual head of Christendom. The fifth 
century is to begin with the first Innocent, and the mid- 
dle of it to hail the first Leo, in whom the Bishop becomes 
a Pope, and the Papacy prophesies what it is to become. 
Of course Paganism, with twelve illustrious centuries be- 
hind it, did not die easily or at once. Rome was still in 
appearance a Pagan city with a hundred and fifty temples, 
and more than that number of shrines, still in use after 
the middle of the fourth century. The Senate, the aris- 
tocracy, clung to the old religion. Before the end of that 
century the mortal conflict came, the mortal blow was 
struck, not by Damasus, the Pope at Rome, but by Am- 
brose, the Archbishop at Milan. In him the Pagan 
Prefect Symmachus found his match rather than in the 
Roman Bishop. Under his instigation the emperor re- 
fused to be the Pagan Pontifex, and the Senate could 
no longer meet under the auspices of that image of vic- 
tory which had been the presiding genius through so 
many generations. At the end of the third century Dio- 
cletian was decreeing the destruction of Christianity, and 
closing its churches. At the end of the fourth century 
Theodosius and his sons were decreeing the abolition of 
Paganism and confiscating its temples. The barbarians 
were gathering like the clouds of a storm, and while the 
feeble Honorius was cowering with fright in the marshes 
of Ravenna, Alaric with his Goths was descending upon 
Rome to plunder and desolate. Her ancient gods were 
looked to in vain for her defense, and with the fall of 
Rome the creed of Paganism was shattered in pieces, and 
its adherents were left to despair. It was Alaric the 
Visigoth, and Genseric the Vandal, quite as much as any 
Christian preaching or any imperial edicts, which killed 
Paganism in Rome. 

And yet it was not to perish altogether. For, uncon- 
'sciously almost, a compromise was going on, and if Pagan- 



ROME. 93 

ism could not stand by itself, it was content to be assim- 
ilated rather than extirpated. Christianity in the fifth 
century was willing to make friends with it, and preserve 
in its festivals, in its rituals, in its saints and martyrs, in 
its semi-deification of the mother of Jesus, the remains of 
the sj^stem it was strong enough to displace, and yet not 
courageous enough to destroy.-^ Paganism took its revenge 
by allowing its adherents to become Christians while they 
were half Pagans, and its mythologies survived in a Pa- 
ganized Christianity, into whose ritual and life the essence 
of Paganism filtered in spite of the teaching of its doctors 
and its creeds. 

After Alaric and his Goths came Attila and his Huns. 
The battle of Chalons had stopped their career in Gaul. 
And now they came over the Alps and menaced Pome, 
which turned trembling to the prayers (if not the diplo- 
macy) of its Bishop, rather than to the arms of its gener- 
als, for defense against the brutal and Pagan barbarians. 
Leo, the Bishop, was joined with the two highest civilians 
of the city to go out and make terms with him. The le- 
gend of the historian and Raphael's picture are made to 
adorn the plain fact that, confronted by the chief Bishop 
of the West, and perhaps deterred by the fate of Alaric, 
by some strange influence or other, he was turned back 
into his forests, and never came in sight of Pome.^ 

And with St. Leo, called the Great, began the race of 
great Popes, indeed the foundation of the Popedom. He 
was a Poman as well as a churchman, and carried states- 
manship, and the gift of organization and rule which be- 
longed to his race, into his spiritual office. Says Dean 
Milman : " Leo was a Poman in sentiment as in birth. 
All that survived of Pome, of her unbounded ambition, 
her dignity in defeat, her haughtiness of language, her 

1 Conyers Middleton, Letter from Rome, Diet, of Christian Antiqui- 
ties, art. "Paganism." 

2 A. Thierry, Histoire d' Attila, i. 208. 



94 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

belief in her own eternity, and in her indefeasible title to 
universal dominion, her respect for traditionary and writ- 
ten law, and of unchangeable custom, might seem concen- 
tred in him alone." ^ tlis ambition was to establish the 
monarchical authority of the Roman See. Already out of 
practical and theological necessities had come the doctrine 
of the unity of the Church. And to be one, the Church 
must have a single head, and the head must be in Rome. 
And he can be no other than the lineal successor of St. 
Peter, the Bishop of the Roman Church, the spiritual Fa- 
ther and Pope of the Church Universal. And with Leo 
this was more than a theory. His practical genius, his 
energetic will, his commanding position, stamped the au- 
thority of the Pope on all Latin Christendom. He suc- 
ceeded in consolidating the power of the Roman See, so 
that in the West at least it should hold real if not undis- 
turbed dominion for a thousand years. 

It has come to this. On the assumption, the unfounded 
assumption, of a superiority, a primacy of Peter among 
the apostles, of the Roman Church among the churches, of 
an hereditary preeminence and authority in the Bishop 
of Rome, the once humble presbyter of a Roman congre- 
gation is turned into a spiritual monarch, with a throne 
higher and more durable than that of the emperors dur- 
ing five centuries. He is the Bishop of bishops, the Pon- 
tifex Maximus, and at length a temporal Prince, the ruler 
of rulers, and the vicar of God. 

Thenceforth the history of the Church in Rome is the 
history of the supreme Pontiff of Latin Christendom. The 
Pope absorbs all historical importance, as all spiritual 
power. The Church there is lost in the greater and ecu- 
menical Church of which the Roman Bishop becomes head 
and ruler. And the history of the Church for ten centu- 
ries to come is the history of the Papacy, of that Roman 
Pontificate, which, beginning with Innocent and Leo in 
^ Latin Christianity, i. 230. 



ROME. 95 

the fifth century, culminates in Gregory VII. and Innocent 
III., and has its two hundred and sixty-third tenant still 
ruling- in the Vatican. There is still a church in Rome, 
but it is no longer a congregation with its presbyter ; it is 
a Pope with his curia, a spiritual Empire with its Caesar on 
the throne, and its generals, its regiments, its provinces 
covering Christendom. 

The fifth century, the middle of which was the age of 
Leo, was " a period of despair and languor throughout 
the Christian community, when the idea of advancing the 
bounds of Christianity, once so rife and effectual, was 
tacitly abandoned." ^ On the frontiers were the barba- 
rians menacing civilization, and possibly the existence of 
the Church itself. And the anxieties of Leo, great as he 
was, were expended on the consolidation of authority, rather 
than on the conversion of new nations, and the strength- 
ening rather than the extension of the Church. The Goths 
came and set up a king of their own in place of the Ro- 
man Emperor. The Lombards were to follow, to the ter- 
ror of the Popes. And out beyond them were the Teutonic 
tribes, impatient for conquest, waiting to be conquered for 
Christ. For this nobler work the next, the sixth, century 
was a preparation ; monasticism with Benedict at its head 
for its great promoter, and Gregory I., the next of the 
great Popes, to commit the See and Church of Pome ta its 
prosecution. Clovis and his Franks, from whom came 
modern France, first came into the Church, and with con- 
sequences of mingled good and evil for the Roman See, 
and for subsequent European history, of the first impor- 
tance. And then came the mission to England, proceed- 
ing directly from Gregory the Great, with the conversion 
of the Saxons, with consequences to all the world quite as 
momentous. A century later, under Gregory II. (715- 
731), Boniface brought Germany into the faith. 

But in the eighth century, in fear of the Lombard, the 
1 Merivale, Epochs in Early Church History, p. 170. 



96 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

Pope turns to the Frank for succor. The power of the 
Franks had fallen out of the hands of the degenerate heirs 
of Clovis into the mightier grasp of Charles Martel, who 
had delivered Christendom from the Saracens on the field 
of Poictiers, and now of his son and grandson Pepin, and 
Charles the Great. They now came into Italy to give and 
to take. And it was in exchange of reciprocal benefits 
that the Pope received that addition to his patrimony 
known as The States of the Church, while he in turn, so 
far as was in his power, gave to Charles, the king of the 
Franks, that imperial crown which, since 476 and the reign 
of Augustus, had passed away from the West to Constan- 
tinople ; that Empire which, if it appears to date from the 
coronation of Charlemagne, really began when Augustus 
returned victorious from the battle of Actium (September 
2, 31 B. c), and ended only when in 1806 Francis II. of 
Austria gave it up by the compulsion of Napoleon Bona- 
parte. It was on Christmas Day in the year 800, while 
Charles was kneeling in prayer before the high altar in 
that ancient basilica which Constantine erected in honor 
of St. Peter, that the Pope, Leo III., came forward, " and 
as in the sight of all, he j)laced upon the brow of the bar- 
barian chieftain the diadem of the Csesars, then bent in 
obeisance before him, the church rang to the shout of the 
multitude, again free, again the lords and centre of the 
world, ' Karola Augu&to a Deo coronoio magno et 2^cicifico 
imperator vita et victoria.'^ In that shout, echoed by the 
Franks without, was pronounced the union, so long in 
preparation, so mighty in its consequences, of the Eoman 
and the Teuton, of the memories and the civilization of 
the South with the fresh energy of the North ; and from 
that moment modern history begins." ^ 

Here, too, stood face to face the two great powers, now 
so friendly, whose fatal feud was to distract Latin Chris- 
tendom for the next five hundred years. When two go 
^ Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 49. 



ROME. 97 

horseback, one must ride behind. The compact between 
Empire and Popedom was full of danger, and which 
should be uppermost was the real and constant contest. 
The Pope crowns the Emperor, but the Emperor must 
confirm the election of the Pope. Now the state domi- 
nates and uses the Church, and again the Church subjects 
the state to a spiritual despotism. The supremacy of the 
Church, the autocracy of the Pope, was the idea always 
contending for victory through the Middle Age, — now 
seeming to win it, and yet in the end really defeated. In 
less than three hundred years from the coronation, of 
Charlemagne, the Emperor will be at Canossa, standing 
barefoot in the snow, a suppliant for admission to the pres- 
ence of Gregory VII., and it looks as if Hildebrand were 
master of the world. In five hundred years Boniface 
VIII., with a suicidal audacity, will tighten the splendid 
cord woven by Innocent III. till it breaks, and the Popes 
will go into exile from Rome for seventy years, and then 
into schism for forty years, and at last confront the rebel- 
lion of Teutonic Christendom against their dominion for- 
ever. 

They were of all sorts, and carried the Popedom 
through all stages of exaltation and depression, into au- 
dacious heights of pretension, into the vilest depths of in- 
famy. It was built up on a vast system of forgery (the 
Isidorian Decretals) ; it was fought for ; it was bought 
and sold ; it was won and lost by intrigue, by violence, by 
the influence of infamous women, of ambitious princes, of 
profligate Churchmen. It was held by vicars of the Holi- 
est Person, who were yet without learning, without faith, 
without virtue, without decency even ; infidels, voluptu- 
aries, nepotists, pornocrats. It sank to such baseness 
and profanation that its own historians not unnaturally 
claim it for a sign of the divinity of the institution, and 
a miracle rather than a marvel, that it survived such deg- 
radation, and even recovered its lost glory. It was suc- 
7 



98 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

cored by the German Emperors, and by reaction against 
the extravagance of its own iniquity. And yet it sank 
again, and after four centuries, with the revival of learn- 
ing, with the coming of new light, with the signs of a 
new age, the Borgias and Medicis were no better than 
the creatures of Theodora and Marozia, showing that the 
sanctity of the office made no difference to such mis- 
creants as John XII. and Alexander VI. If history was 
worth anything, it proved that the Popedom was a bad 
institution ; that bad men made it worse, that good men 
could not make it good. And the world grew weary at 
last of a Popedom with such a history. Religion wanted 
the freedom it had lost, " an ampler ether, a diviner air." 
The Church had often groaned in its restlessness for a 
deliverance always postponed. Western Christendom was 
recovering from its long paralysis, its nationalities find- 
ing independence and power, and its pulses feeling the 
stir of new life. It was dropping feudalism. It was dis- 
covering new worlds. It was going to govern itself. Re- 
form was attempted and failed. Three councils tried it 
in vain. The next step was revolution. And that came. 
It could not help coming. Rome was no longer the capi- 
tal of Christendom ; the Pope was no longer its ecclesias- 
tical ruler. Switzerland, Germany, England, Holland, the 
North of Europe, the better half of Christendom, broke 
from him in violent protest. He remained an Italian 
Prince. The Council of Trent tried to secure what was 
left. The Jesuits, more than the monastic or mendicant 
orders before them, controlled and sustained the Papal 
Chair, and tried to recover what was lost. One hundred 
and fifty millions of people in all countries still bow to 
its spiritual authority. On the 18th of July, 1870, the 
Vatican Council decreed the Infallibility of the Pope, the 
last step in his spiritual exaltation. And yet, in a little 
more than a year after, his temporal power, more than 
eleven hundred years old, was gone. The exigencies of 



ROME. 99 

France annulled the old gift of the Franks, and Italy, 
after centuries of struggle and hope deferred, had its own 
king, acknowledged from Turin to Palermo, with Rome 
for its capital. The Vatican is left for the home of the 
Pontiff, and that is all. He is an ecclesiastic, and nothing 
more. Even Catholic nations are very polite and benev- 
olent to the Holy Father, and perhaps believe in him; 
but they govern themselves. He is no longer a civil 
ruler. He can no longer bind and loose kings and gov- 
ernments at his pleasure. His power is felt in many 
ways, but it is only as a spiritual potentate, and under his 
own ecclesiastical jurisdiction. So long as they can have 
free choice, and vote for their own governors, even Cath- 
olics will not submit to civil rule or political domination 
in an ecclesiastic, however exalted. 

And this is the history of Christianity in Rome. It 
began with a few Christians, perhaps with the preaching 
of a traveling presbyter, possibly of an apostle. When 
it first had a Bishop, he was chosen by the clergy and the 
people, and his power was only the power of his Church. 
It soon hardened into an ecclesiasticism which, not con- 
tent with its single church, inherited the ambition of the 
old Rome to govern the world. It took a marvelous con- 
tinuity, which links the first Leo with the thirteenth, 
which has kept in succession its two hundred and sixty- 
three Popes, still Bishops of Rome, while infallible Pon- 
tiffs of Catholic Christendom. How long an Italian priest 
will rule without appeal over bishops and clergy and 
churches in every country in Christendom, nobody knows. 
Rome is no longer the Rome it was, except in memories 
and traditions. And yet the Holy Father dares not for- 
sake it, lest he break the continuity, and lose the sanc- 
tity which belongs to the See of St. Peter. It would be 
still the Popedom, however, wherever he is, whether at 
Malta or Madrid. It will take more than exile to destroy 
it. It will fall only before such great moral convulsions, 



100 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

or such great secular changes, as before this have removed 
the foundations laid through many generations, and by 
which authority is transferred from kings and priests to 
the people, from churches to the conscience, and from 
great establishments to that Holy See which stands eter- 
nal in the soul of man. God never gave to St. Peter, nor 
to any man, such power as the Popes have held, and still 
hold, over millions of human beings, over congregations 
and clergy who acknowledge the Lordship of that Christ 
who declared, even in the presence of the imperial pro- 
curator of Rome, that His kingdom is not of this world. 
It is ecclesiastical absolutism, it is religious despotism, 
suppressing instead of developing, inconsistent with the 
spirit of original Christianity, repugnant to the better in- 
telligence of Christendom, a block to the better progress 
of the world, governing in the interests of authority rather 
than of truth, of power rather than of liberty ; and it 
must come to an end, or to a great change, before Chris- 
tianity can become the salvation of the human race. 

Rome took, and it also gave, as it must where it and 
Christianity come together. The new religion took a 
stamp from the great civil polity, from the strong social 
life, from the new order of ideas into which it came, and 
could not help it. Jewish and Hellenic, it became Roman 
too. The title on the cross was written in Hebrew and 
Greek and Latin, significant of the three great currents 
with which the Christian stream was to mingle, of the con- 
trolling elements in its history. The force which shaped 
Pagan Rome passed over into Christian Rome, not in an 
inheritance of Pagan ceremonies only, but of power and 
life. Rome stood before the world for order, organization, 
authority. Her genius was legal, her security, her success, 
her power, was in law. And the genius of Rome cast the 
Christianity of the West into its matrix to create another 
type than in the East. Ecclesiastical organization was 
moulded by civil. The Roman state was reproduced in 



ROME. 101 

the Roman Church, as the spirit of Roman law penetrated 
the Roman theology. The Western Church was political 
more than sacerdotal. The Popes were legislators and 
administrators more than theologians. And the theology 
of the West exercised itself on different questions, and 
with quite other methods than those of the East. The 
Roman Law supplied a new order of ideas, taken from 
jurisprudence rather than metaphysics; and the Roman 
Theology has been forensic rather than scientific, practical 
more than speculative, busy with the nature of man rather 
than the nature of God, with sin and justification more 
than with the Trinity and Incarnation, — in a word, Roman 
rather than Hellenic. " Why is it, then," asks Sir Henry 
Maine, " that, on the two sides of the line which divides 
the Greek -speaking from the Latin -speaking provinces, 
there lie two classes of theological problems so strikingly 
different from one another ? The historians of the Church 
have come close upon the solution when they remark that 
the new problems were more ' practical,' less absolutely 
speculative, than those which had torn Eastern Christian- 
ity asunder ; but none of them, so far as I am aware, has 
quite reached it. I affirm without hesitation that the dif- 
ference between the two theological systems is accounted 
for by the fact that, in passing from the East to the West, 
theological speculation had passed from a climate of 
Greek metaphysics to a climate of Roman law." ^ That 
supplied ideas and terms into which the problems of the- 
ology cast themselves, and directed the course of reasoning 
which led to their solution. 

And so Rome created a type of theology, of religion, of 
ecclesiastical government, as it had of political life and 
organization, which has been perpetuated through all the 
generations of Latin Christendom. Jerusalem fell, and 
went out of history. Alexandria decayed, and passed 
under another faith. But Rome, throuoh more than eio;h- 
1 Ancient Law, ch. iv. p. 346. 



102 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

teen hundred years, with their vicissitudes, through ages 
of darkness and ruin, through ages of genius and glory, 
under her Emperors, under Greek Exarchs, under Pon- 
tiffs who were saints and Pontiffs who were miscreants, 
from first to last has been a Christian city. Into it Mos- 
lem and Pagan have not come. The Reformation did 
not touch it, certainly not to alter it. Its chief Bishop is 
at the head of a priesthood eighteen centuries old, and as 
wide as the world. Forth from it have always gone laws 
for Catholic Christendom. Like Babylon and Troy and 
Memphis and Mycense, it may perish in some yet unan- 
ticipated future. But for good or for evil, for falsehood 
or for truth, for the arrest or the progress of the kingdom 
of God, for both indeed, for all the Christianity there 
was through many generations, for an indestructible part 
of Christian history of all the centuries, Rome will stand 
forever in men's memories, in the tide of time, as the 
supreme city of the world. 



IV. CONSTANTINOPLE. 

It would have been a part of the strange irony of his- 
tory, of its singular retrogressions, had Constautine, seek- 
ing a place for a new capital of his Empire, planted it, as 
at one time he proposed, on the plain of ancient Troy.^ 

Thence the early Roman legends brought the ancestors 
of the Latin race. The best Roman poetry had sung the 
flight of ^neas from the burning Troy, bringing the in- 
cunabula of Roman greatness, the germ of Roman civiliza- 
tion, out of the East. To build a new Rome on the ruins 
of the city, whose siege was the inspiration of the two 
great epics of the ancient world, would have had a poetic 
or sentimental reason, and nothing more. But with no 
regard to antiquity, he chose with an eye to situation, 
and preferred the Bosphorus to the Hellespont, and By- 
zantium to Troy, although the control of one was likely 
to include the control of the other. He chose Byzantium, 
not merely because here he had defeated Licinius, and 
made the whole empire his own. He saw, as the masters 
of empire have seen ever since, that its tenant stood at 
the centre of command, and held the " Gordian knot of 
the world." He saw its incomparable advantages, land- 
ward as a promontory readily defended, and seaward in 
a harbor connecting with all the seas, with water deep 
and clean and tideless, with Europe on the right hand 
and Asia on the left, and easy of defense on either 
side. Between two seas and two continents, it seemed 
to be set on the axis of the world. With a foresight 

^ So Zosiraus states, and in his time some of tlie beginnings were to 
be seen. It is also reported that he had thought of Sardiea, in Moe- 
sia, and that he used to say, " My Rome is at Sardiea." A. De 
Broglie, UEglise et' U Empire, ii. 144. 



104 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

equal to Alexander's at Alexandria, and with even bet- 
ter opportunity, he selected a site such as he could find 
nowhere else in the East or West ; such as their found- 
ers have not found in Petersburg, or Berlin, or Madrid, 
or Washington. 

" He called into being a city which, while other cities 
have risen or fallen, has for fifteen hundred years, in 
whatever hands, remained the seat of Imperial rule ; a city 
which as long as Europe and Asia, as long as land and sea, 
keep their places, must remain the seat of Imperial rule. 
The other capitals of Europe seem by her side things of 
yesterday, creations of accident. Some chance, a few centu- 
ries back, made them seats of government till some other 
chance may cease to make them seats of government, but the 
city of Constantine abides and must abide. Over and over 
again has the possession of that city prolonged the dura- 
tion of powers which must otherwise have crumbled away. 
In the hands of Roman, Frank, Greek, and Turk, her im- 
perial mission has never left her. The eternity of the elder 
Rome is the eternity of a moral influence ; the eternity of 
the younger Rome is the eternity of a city and fortress 
fixed on a spot which nature itself had destined to be the 
seat of the empire of two worlds." ^ 

For almost a thousand years there had been a Greek 
town there, but its great destiny had not been fulfilled by 
the Greeks. It fell to the Romans. Th^ defeat of Max- 
entius at the Milvian Bridge did not secure the undivided 
Empire to Constantine. For a dozen years Licinius kept 
up the contest, and it was at the Bosphorus at last he had 
to surrender. In the year 324 Byzantium, with the whole 
Empire, east and west, became Constantine's, and he de- 
termined to turn it into a new Rome. 

But it was not the fortunate issue of war, nor the dis- 
covery of a happy location for a city, nor even some 
ambition of a victorious emperor, which gave the Empire 
^ Freeman, Historical Essays, third series, 251 . 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 106 

a new capital in the East. The design was begotten in 
the mind of Constantine by other and deeper causes. 
Under Diocletian's partition of the Empire, and for some 
time before under the soldier emperors, Rome had been 
losing its importance. Nicomedia was large enough for 
the emperor in the East, and Diocletian, in his twenty 
years' reign visited Rome but once. 

Constantine for years had his palace and headquar- 
ters in Treves. But when the Empire was reconsolidated 
under Constantine, and undivided sovereignty came back 
to his single hand, a new capital became a necessity, so he 
thought. For he hated Eome. He had no memories of 
it but disagreeable ones. He had never lived there. He 
had visited it but twice, and the last time he left it in dis- 
gust, if not in wrath ; perhaps in remorse for his own 
crimes, certainly in revulsion from its religion. The Sen- 
ate was Pagan, and could not be relied upon to support 
the new regime. The aristocracy and the populace, too, 
were averse to the new faith. The city everywhere was 
full of the monuments of Paganism, the awful shadows 
of the ancient temples falling upon all its life. It must 
be built over again before it could be such a capital as a 
Christian Emperor would want. It was a Pagan city, and 
he wanted a place where Christianity could sit on its own 
throne with a certainty of its own succession, and with no 
burden of a Pagan past to carry. In a new Rome he 
could sever his administration from the influences of the 
old religion, and " put the new wine into new bottles." ^ 

He but obeyed the necessary tendency of things, as well 
as his own purposes or passions, when he resolved to for- 
sake the old capital of the Caesars, and build an entirely 
new one in the corner rather than the centre of Europe. 
He could not anticipate all the consequences of such a 
transfer, — the passage of power to the barbarians, the 

1 De Broglie, UEglise et U Empire, ii. chap, vi., " Fondation de 
Constantinople." 



106 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

increase of it in the Roman Bishop, the separations in 
the Church and the Empire, the fascination, old and new, 
which Rome would keep over the minds of men for ages. 

He may have foreseen the risks, as well as the great 
possibilities not exhausted even yet, of a throne on the 
Bosphorus, and may have taken them rather than keep 
the centre of the Empire where it had been. At all 
events he made the venture, and gave a new turn to his- 
tory. As it was a new city, so it was artificial and man- 
ufactured. It did not grow like the old Rome. It sprung 
at once into the greatness of a capital. It covered the 
whole point of the promontory between Propontis and 
the Golden Horn, with its seven hills. The cities of 
Greece were stripped to adorn it. To this day, there re- 
main parts of a brazen column brought from the shrine 
of Apollo at Delphi, " probably the most remarkable relic 
that the world possesses." ^ If it had no amphitheatre for 
gladiators, it had a hippodrome for chariot races. Market- 
places, porticoes, courts, baths, and palaces were erected 
at once at great cost. It was its boast that it was a 
Christian city from the start. Its air was never tainted 
by the smoke of Pagan sacrifice. Senators and distin- 
guished families from Rome were induced to reside there. 
Settlers of all names and from all sides came, drawn by 
the privileges and exemptions of the place, and gave it a 
mixed population. On the 11th of May, 330, it was dedi- 
cated with a grand ceremonial, partly religious and partly 
secular, and the day was observed for centuries as the 
festival of the nativity of Constantinople. For this was 
the legal name it received, though the Emperor joined 
with it the name of Second or New Rome. For it was his 
favorite fancy to reproduce the old city in the new. It 
began as a Roman city, the capital of the Roman Empire 
in the East, though in time, as was natural, the Greek 
element prevailed, and before long the Empire is Byzan- 
tine and the Church is Greek. 

^ Bryce, Constantinople, 19. 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 107 

Following the example of Diocletian, he Orientalized 
his administration, while he also Romanized it. He created 
a multitude of new offices, and added immensely to the 
burdens of taxation. Absurdly extravagant titles were 
given to officials, and the Emperor himself was more like 
a Sultan than a Caesar. Beyond all this, he devised an 
elaborate scheme by which the civil functions of the state 
were separated from the military, and both from the spir- 
itual, — a distinction before unknown, which has contin- 
ued in the political European nations ever since.^ 

The Empire now had a new capital, and so in one sense 
had the Church. In time came an Eastern Empire and an 
Eastern Church, and Constantine had prepared for both 
by building Constantinople. He left Rome to her own 
destiny ; to lose her own Empire in that of the barbari- 
ans of the West. He left her Christianity to shape itself 
into separate dominion on the old spot, instead of trans- 
ferring it to a new centre in the East. And yet, whether 
he knew it or not, whether he designed it or not, he was 
laying foundations for another Empire and another Church 
simply by building his New Rome. For the laws of Na- 
ture are mightier often than the will of man, and in the 
long run what is decreed in them (as what is decreed in 
the secrecies of the Divine Providence) gets the victory. 
The difference between the East and the West, the Greek 
and the Roman, Constantinople and Rome, was to come 
out in the history of the Church. And so the city of 
Constantine stands for that type of religion, so different 
from the Jewish or the Roman, which to this day rules so 
large a part of Christendom. 

When the seat of Empire was transferred to Constanti- 
nople, Christianity was three centuries old, and had al- 
ready acquired a power of which its adoption as the reli- 
gion of the Emperor, and very soon of the state, was only 
an outward sign. It had an established, organized, offi- 
1 Encycl. Brit., art. " Constantine." 



108 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

cered corporation. It had taken deep root in the thought 
and life of the time. Thirty years later, Julian tried in 
vain to revive Paganism, and turn back the tide setting to- 
wards the new faith. His opposition was brief, but it could 
not have arrested the growth of the Church had it run 
through a generation. In the East, Christianity had the 
advantage, for it was in the East, sooner and more strongly 
than in the West, that it had established itself. There it 
had its beginnings. Even in Rome, its beginnings were 
Greek. The New Testament was in the Greek tongue. 
The first General Council was held far away in Nicaea, 
and, ecumenical as it was counted, of its more than three 
hundred members not more than eight were from the West. 
The question it debated arose in the East ; its discus- 
sions were in the Greek language, as was the creed which 
it adopted. In fact the first seven councils, which even the 
Roman Church acknowledged to be ecumenical, were all 
held in the East, and were engaged over eastern questions. 
In time Eastern Christianity had acquired such a distinct 
theology and life that it separated itself from the West 
into a church of its own. It had no single patriarch, like 
the Roman Bishop in the West. But in the course of 
events the patriarch of Constantinople took the precedence 
over Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem natural to the 
Bishop of the political capital. In 457, at the Council of 
Chalcedon, his See was declared equal in power and only 
second in rank to that of Rome, " forasmuch as it is a New 
Rome." This division of ecclesiastical power determined 
the character of the Eastern Church, and distinguished it 
from the monarchical despotism of the West. The one 
allowed national churches : the other effaced them, and 
compelled them to acknowledge the primacy of Rome. 
And the junction of ecclesiastical with political power de- 
termined considerably the course of Eastern Christianity. 
Becoming the religion of the Emperor, in time it became 
the religion of the Empire. At first, under Constantine, a 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 109 

privileged religion, under Tlieodosius it became the estab- 
lished one [380] . Before the end of the fourth century 
Paganism was suppressed by law, and the State and the 
Church were united. Constantine began by convoking the 
Nicene Council, and by the time of Justinian dogmatic 
controversies were settled by imperial decrees. The belief 
as well as the discipline of the Church was determined by 
the Emperors, not more because they had the power than 
because it was the wish of the people ; and many of them 
were as well versed in theology as in government. 

Constantine was no theologian, and yet one of the first 
things he had to do for the Church was to settle a theolog- 
ical controversy, really the first and greatest in its history. 
He might not appreciate all the significance of the ques- 
tion on which parties were forming, but he had the sa- 
gacity to see the importance of unity in the new Church, 
even for the sake of the Empire itself. And so he called 
together the bishops of Christendom in council. There was 
not yet a Constantinople, and so he called them to Nicaea 
in Bithynia, in the last of May, 325, in the twentieth 
year of his reign. Three hundred and eighteen bishops, 
about a sixth of the whole number, came. He had just 
conquered Licinius, and brought civil war to an end. He 
could now put his hand to heal the wounds of the Church. 
The trouble was Arianism. It began in Egypt. Alex- 
andria was the natural birthplace of such a heresy. 
Alexander was Bishop. Pope he was called, and the quar- 
rel began with him. Bat the real combatants were Arius 
and Athanasius. Arius was a man in advanced life, al- 
ready more than sixty years old. Athanasius was young, 
under twenty-five. The one was a presbyter, the other 
only a deacon. They both came to Nicaea, though neither 
was a member of the Council. It was the doctrine of 
Arius, which for six or seven years had been creating great 
agitation, which gave occasion for the Council. The ques- 
tion in dispute was chiefly speculative, and concerned the 



110 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

interior nature of God, and the relations of the Divine 
Father and Son. Arianism held that, while the Father 
had no beginning, the Son had ; that the Son had a de- 
rived, created existence, and was not of the same substance 
as the Father; in a word, it made Christ inferior, and 
struck a blow at the Incarnation as the fundamental truth 
of Christianity. The decision of the Council was against 
it. Arius was sent into exile, and a creed adopted which 
affirmed the Christ to be " very God of very God, begot- 
ten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by 
whom all things were made." 

The Nicene Creed has suffered some verbal changes, but 
it has stood in the Church, the oldest, the most unchange- 
able, the most universal of the creeds. Arianism held out 
for a time, and, counting its history among the Gothic 
races, for a long time. For fifty years and more it had 
more or less of imperial favor, especially under Constan- 
tius [337-360]. If Arius went into exile, so did Athana- 
sius, four times and for twenty years of his life. After 
Arius had passed eighty years of age he returned to Con- 
stantinople, and the Emperor ordered his restoration to 
the communion of the Church. On Sunday he was to be 
received in solemn procession from the imperial palace. 
But on Saturday, towards night, he was seized with sud- 
den illness in the forum and died. It was quite in the 
spirit of the time for Athanasius, who had just been ban- 
ished to Treves, to declare such a death a divine judgment 
on Arius, and a sufficient refutation of his heresy. For 
forty years the conflict went on, bitterly, vehemently, with- 
out reason or charity on either side. Council neutralized 
council. Power might be with the Arians, but argument 
was with the orthodox ; with the great Athanasius and 
the three great Cappadocians, — Basil, Gregory of Nazi- 
anzen, and Gregory of Nyssa. Finally came the great 
Theodosius to conquer the Goths, for a time to restore and 
reunite the Empire, and by force to banish Arianism from 
the Church. 



CONSTANTINOPLE. Ill 

Theodosius was a Spaniard, as were Trajan and Ha- 
drian before liiin. He had the Spanish temper. He was 
devout, even to superstition, and yet a voluptuary; he 
was passionate, even to recklessness and cruelty ; he was 
indolent until roused to action, when he was courage- 
ous and energetic ; he could commit the worst crime in 
history, like the massacre at Thessalonica, and then bow 
his imperial head in penance before the imperious ecclesi- 
astic at Milan. He had neglected baptism until the sec- 
ond year of his reign, and then he at once took ground 
against Arianism as a fatal heresy, and ordained that the 
adherents of the Nicene Creed should be known as Cath- 
olic Christians.^ 

Constantinople was the stronghold of the interdicted 
sect, its See and its churches possessed by the Arian party. 
He soon changed all this. Bishops and clergy must sub- 
scribe the orthodox creed or be expelled. With equal 
severity he suppressed heresy and Paganism, with Am- 
brose in Milan and Gregory in Constantinople to spur him 
on. The second General Council he called in Constanti- 
nople [381] to tighten the bonds of the Nicene Creed, and 
fasten it upon the Church. In fifteen years he issued as 
many as fifteen edicts against all who did not accept it. 
He commissioned inquisitors in the spirit of his later 
countrymen, Dominic and Torquemada. In the interest 
of the Christian Faith he violated its whole spirit and 
law. Naturally, as a soldier, he believed in force, while 
as a Christian he had not learned the first lesson in the 
power of truth, and the freedom and charity of the Gos- 
pel. But, right or wrong, for injury or benefit, the 

1 ''We will that those who embrace this creed be called Catholic 
Christians. We brand all the senseless followers of other religions 
by the infamous name of heretics, and forbid their conventicles to as- 
sume the name of churches. We reserve their punishment to the 
vengeance of Heaven, and to such measures as divine inspiration 
«hall dictate to us." — Gibbon ; Milman, Christianity, iii. 100. 



112 CITIES OF OUB FAITH. 

Churcli was indebted to Theodosins for establishing unity 
of faith, and delivering her from a great internal danger. 
If Arius met his confutation in Athanasius, his influence 
was destroyed by Theodosius. 

After the building of Constantinople the Empire was 
always liable to fall apart, and with the death of Theodo- 
sius (January 17, 395) the division came. He left two 
sons, boys in years, both weak, ignorant, unfit for the cares 
of empire ; and yet to the two fell the divided rule of the 
Roman world. In eighty years the Empire of the West 
fell into the hands of the barbarians. For a thousand 
years longer the Empire of the East continued with the 
successors of Theodosius. His eldest son, Arcadius, now 
eighteen years old, had none of the imperial qualities of 
his father. The father was manly, handsome, sagacious, 
prudent, with a will of his own. The son was small, ill- 
shaped, swarthy, without vigor of mind or body, ruled by 
eunuchs or women, as became too much the custom in the 
East. The glory and shame of his reign gathers round 
John of the Golden Mouth, known to all ages as Chrysos- 
tom, who honored Constantinople by his eloquence, as it 
was disgraced by his sufferings. He was called from the 
See of Antioch, and made Archbishop of Constantinople ; 
but the purity of his life and the power of his preaching 
wrought his ruin. For they provoked the anger of the 
Empress Eudoxia, who compelled the timid Arcadius to 
send him into a banishment in the mountains of Armenia, 
which was death. His fall was the degradation of his of- 
fice for all the centuries after. The Bishop of Constan- 
tinople could never be an Ambrose or a Leo. He could 
never be Pope from his very position. He was often the 
nominee of the Emperor, often his underling and depend- 
ent, rarely resisting him, and generally obliged to yield to 
his will, even his caprice. His brother of Rome ruled 
and shaped religion in the West with independence and 
with vigor. In the East it was the creature of the State, 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 113 

and the State was a despotism. It was mixed with the 
intrigues of the court and the fashions of the cities, and 
had no Gregory or Innocent to assert its sujjremacy. Its 
disputes kindled the most malignant passions, involved 
the populace as well as the clergy, and were decided at 
last by the Emperors rather than the theologians. 

Arianism never succeeded m forming a Church. But 
new questions soon ap]3eared as its natural sequel, produc- 
ing new heresies, — Nestorian, Monophysite, Eutychian, 
Monothelite, — out of which grew not sects only, but 
churches ; the Coptic, the Ethiopic, the Jacobite, the Ar- 
menian, the Maronite, permanently severed from the or- 
thodox communion. The question was still, how God be- 
came man, and in what relation the two natures in Christ 
stood to each other. The answers run, in the main, into 
two very different and extreme types, the one disjoining 
the two natures as if incapable of real union, the other mix- 
ing and confounding them as if inseparably one. And the 
doctrinal were national divisions as well, in part, and per- 
haps sprung out of national causes. Nestorianism came 
from Antioch, and found its home in the East. Monophy- 
sitism was born in Alexandria and had its home in Egy23t, 
while neither took any hold in the Greek or Latin Church. 
The first two General Councils established the Nicene doc- 
trine as against Arianism ; the second defining more dis- 
tinctly the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and their decision 
stands even with the schismatic churches. 

In a period of three hundred years (381-681) four 
other councils defined still further the doctrine of the 
nature of Christ, especially against Nestorians, Mono- 
physites, and Monothelites, to be accepted of course by 
the Orthodox Church, and rejected by those in schism. 
These questions, agitations, quarrels, affected the Empire 
quite as much as the Church, and the Emperor had his 
hand in them quite as much as ecclesiastics. Often his 
influence was felt in the councils ; generally he enforced 



114 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

their decisions ; sometimes lie attempted the conciliation 
of parties, as Zeno in his Kenoticon ; or, like Theodosius 
or Justinian, he undertook to establish orthodoxy as a part • 
of his imperial office and policy. 

Questions in theology, abstract, and remote from any 
practical interest of life, were the politics of the court, 
and influenced the policy of the Empire. And it was in 
the quality of the Greek mind also that they should take 
their part in the life of the common people every day. 
All were theologians and disputants together. Gregory 
of Nyssa draws a lively picture of Constantinople in the 
time of the Arian controversy : " Every corner and nook 
of the city is full of men, who discuss incomprehensible 
subjects ; the streets, the markets, the people who sell old 
clothes, those who sit at the tables of the money-changers, 
those who deal in provisions. Ask a man how many oboli 
it comes to, he gives you a specimen of dogmatizing on 
generated or ungenerated being. Inquire the price of 
bread, you are answered the Father is greater than the 
Son, and the Son is subordinate to the Father. Ask if 
the bath is ready, and you are answered, the Son of God 
was created from nothing." ^ 

Among the Emperors who aspired to settle these dis- 
putes, and to be a lawgiver in the Church as well as in the 
State, was Justinian, who was really the great figure on 
the throne in the sixth century. It was really a double 
figure, for he is not to be separated from Theodora, whom 
he made his wife and Empress when he came to the throne. 
She was the daughter of a bear-keeper in the hippodrome, 
in her girlhood a performer of pantomime in the theatre, 
a notorious courtesan, who had some inducement to re- 
form, and had fascination enough left to inspire the pas- 
sion of a man of twice her age, who was not only the 
emperor, but addicted to study, industrious, abstemious in 
his habits, and as fond of theology as he was of govern- 
^ Neander, Church History, ii. 432. 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 115 

ment. Never anj^tliing stranger than sucli a marriage, 
unless it be its sequel. For ^dtli the charms of person 
and manner which won the heart of the Emperor went 
energ}^ courage, tenacious purpose, capacity to rule. She 
left her old life behind, and became an Empress indeed. 
When Justinian quailed before the great insurrection of 
Nike and proposed to fly, she stood firm, and inspired 
even Belisarius with her inflexible purpose. She said she 
would die in the purple rather than live in exile. But as 
she was without fear she was without pity. If she be- 
came virtuous, she never ceased to be cruel. She was true 
to her husband, but she was implacable to her enemies. 
He survived her, and credited to her wise and prudent 
counsel his best achievements. 

He had his likeness to Louis XI Y. with a Du Barry or 
De Pompadour for his wife rather than his mistress. He 
shares ^\ith. Constantine and Theodosius the name of 
Great, and yet it was a mixed greatness. It was a great 
reign, and yet he was not really a great man, unless 
knowing how to make use of others constitutes greatness. 
His designs may have been far-reaching, but he depended 
on others to carry them out. He was a man of moderate 
abilities, and for courage he depended on Theodora. He 
was vain, and yet allowed his wife to rule him ; as weak 
as he was proud. He was very ambitious, but he was 
timid. He was temperate and regular in his life, but 
cold, treacherous, ungrateful. If he was religious, he 
was also a bigot and a persecutor. He was as prodigal as 
he was rapacious. He prepared for future disaster by a 
splendid extravagance. He was suspicious and ungener- 
ous. He was petty and pedantic. Restless and unceas- 
ing activity was his most marked quality ; intermeddling 
with everything, and often making change for the sake of 
change. With his great generals, Belisarius and Narses, 
he regained Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the 
Goths, and repelled invasions from Bulgaria and Persia. 



116 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

With his great lawyers under Tribonian, he codified the 
Roman law, and accomplished a great work in legislation ; 
unappreciated at the time, but which has kept his name 
in honor for all generations. He aspired to regulate the- 
ology as well as jurisprudence, and to be a theologian as 
well as Emperor. He had the advantage that what he 
could not carry by argument he could by force. He tried 
to bring back the Monophysites, and yet in his last 3^ears 
he came dangerously near falling into a similar heresy 
himself. He was eighty-three years old when he died. 
He did one great thing for Constantinople, w^hich is a 
possession forever. He built St. Sophia. His was the 
fourth church of the name, preceded by those of Con- 
stantine, Constantius, and. Theodosius the Younger. The 
second echoed with the marvelous eloquence of Chrysos- 
tom, and fell when he went into exile. The third stood 
one hundred and seventeen years [415-532], till, in the 
fifth year of Justinian, it was destroyed in the memora- 
ble conflict of the blue and green factions of the hippo- 
drome. And then he undertook to erect the structure 
which has lasted over thirteen hundred years, to our own 
day. Within seven years after its foundation, Februar}^ 23, 
632, it was dedicated with the Emperor's rather conceited 
exclamation, " I have vanquished thee, O Solomon ! " ^ 
He had expended upon it at least five million dollars,^ and 
employed ten thousand workmen. He adorned it with 
marbles from pagan shrines, and from the quarries of all 
countries. There were eight pillars of red porphyry from 
the Temple of the Sun at Baalbec, eight of green serpen- 
tine from that of Diana of Ephesus, with others from 
those of Apollo at Delos, Minerva at Athens, and Cybele 
at Cyzicus. Mosaics covered the walls and arches, now 
hid under the whitewash of the Moslem. Bronze, silver, 
gold, and gems enriched its altar and sacred places. Its 

1 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, cap. xl. ; Edinburgh Retnew, April, 
1865, p. 46S. 

2 It is set as high as thirteen millions sterling, 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 117 

enormous area is surmounted by a dome so flat that it 
seems to hang in air, with minor domes and arches, and 
throughout " gives one an impression of measureless space, 
of dignity, of majestic unity, which no other church (un- 
less, perhaps, the Cathedral of Seville) can rival. You are 
more awed by it, more lost in it, than in St. Peter's itself." ^ 
The Abbey at Westminster, the cathedrals of St. Denis, 
of Rheims, of the Lateran, of St. Peter's, have their abun- 
dant historical associations, especially for us of the West, 
but the Church of Justinian has an interest altogether 
unique and surpassing. No church really so old remains 
substantially the same, especially after passing from its 
ancient faith to a new and fierce and hostile one. It has 
been a witness of a large part of the history of the By- 
zantine Empire and the Greek Church. Here the Em- 
perors were crowned for nearly a thousand years. Here 
the Patriarchs received investiture. Here took place con- 
troversies and councils, stormy with wrath and all evil 
passion, and violent even to blood. Here the conversion 
of Russia begun, as the envoys of Vladimir were dazzled 
by its gorgeous architecture and splendid ceremonial, and 
went back to report that they had seen in it the glor}^ of 
God. On its altar the legates of the Pope laid the sen- 
tence of excommunication which severed the Greek and 
Latin Churches. Here the last Emperor, Constantine XI., 
took the communion, and went out at the Gate of St. Ro- 
manus to die sword in hand, when it was all he could do 
for his Empire and his faith. It witnessed at last the ter- 
rible death of the Byzantine Empire by the sword of the 
Turk, while the Sultan Mahmoud II. stained one of its 
columns with his blood-smeared hand, shouting, " There is 
no God but God, and Mahomet is the prophet of God." 
Mahomet was born within six years of the death of Jus- 
tinian. From him sprung a mighty movement which 
greatly affected the fortunes of the Eastern Empire and 
1 Bryce, Constantinople, 48. 



118 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

Church. It was, first of all, a protest and crusade against 
all idolatry. It allowed no images. It was met by a cor- 
responding movement in the Eastern Church, possibly 
suggested by it, with which, however, it had but an indi- 
rect connection. Iconoclasra originated with Leo III., the 
Isaurian, in the beginning of the eighth century. It did 
not arise in the Church itself from any spiritual insurrec- 
tion against image-worship. It was the attempt of a vig- 
orous reforming Emperor, by an arbitrary edict, to change 
religious customs which were the growth of centuries, and 
strongly rooted in the habit, if not the faith, of his sub- 
jects. It was more than an effort like that of Justinian 
or Heraclitus to settle articles of speculative belief, and 
touched more tender points. Right or wrong, it proved 
a failure. People can be educated into a superiority to 
ritual observances, but the iconoclastic Emperors put force 
in the place of instruction, and the habit of the Church 
and the opposition of the monks and clergy were too 
strong for them. It fell to two women at last to defeat 
the attempt of the most energetic and courageous em^^er- 
ors. One hundred and sixteen years after the contro- 
versy begun, the weary struggle was brought to end by 
the Empress Theodora in 842. On the first Sunday in 
Lent, the 19th of February, she led the solemn proces- 
sion of ecclesiastics and monks, with dignitaries of the 
State, while with burning torches they made the circuit 
of St. Sophia, saluting the banished pictures now restored 
to its walls, to remain there until the sterner and more 
terrible iconoclasts of another faith, four centuries later, 
should efface them, perhaps forever. 

And now for more than a thousand years that day has 
been kept in the Greek Church as the feast of Orthodoxy, 
the Orthodox Sunday, as it is called. While Iconoclasm 
failed in its purpose, and the use of images, or at least of 
pictures, has remained in the Eastern Church till now, it 
bad consequences of the utmost importance, both in the East 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 119 

and in the West. Instead of strengthening Christendom 
against aggressive Mahometanism, and employing the great 
administrative and military genius of the Isaurian Empe- 
rors for the consolidation of the Byzantine Empire, it cast 
elements of distraction and animosity into men's minds, 
and wasted and weakened energies which might have given 
the Empire new lease of life. It hastened the hour for 
severing the East and West, which seems to have been 
predestined from the foundation of Constantinople. Italy 
was lost to the Byzantine Empire, and fell to the Franks, 
who came over the Alps at the summons of the Popes, 
only to establish another empire in the West, and to give 
the temporal power to the Popes. Henceforth there was 
more distinctly, and in inflexible opposition, an East and a 
West. The difference became disruption. Political sep- 
aration led, and ecclesiastical followed. There were un- 
settled questions of jurisdiction between the Pope and the 
Patriarch over the provinces east of the Adriatic, and then 
over Bulgaria after its conversion, and these kept irrita- 
tion between the two churches till division came. Be- 
hind these was the still greater question of the supremacy 
of the Bishop of Rome, which the Eastern Church would 
not be brought to acknowledge with any sincerity, while 
the Popes, reinforced by the forged Isidorian decretals, 
asserted it with new boldness and success. The quarrel of 
Photius and Ignatius, in which the appeal was made from 
the imperial tyranny to such a daring and imperious Pope 
as Nicolas I., the Pope excommunicating the Patriarch 
and the Patriarch the Pope, drove the wedge still farther. 
And still behind this were the doctrinal questions in dis- 
pute between the two churches. The Latins added 
Fllioque to the Nicene Creed, the only and unchangeable 
dreed of the Eastern Church, making the Spirit proceed 
from the Son as well as from the Father, and this the 
Greeks would not tolerate. And what seemed worst of 
all to common people, the Roman Church used unleavened 



120 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

bread in the Eucharist. They might not comprehend all 
the bearings of a theological doctrine, but they were easily 
scandalized by the absence of yeast, as if that were essen- 
tial to salvation. When the Russian Prince Vladimir was 
converted, the Greek missionary told him to give no heed 
to the emissaries of Rome : " They celebrate the mass with 
unleavened bread : therefore they have not the true reli- 
gion." 

It was this question of azyma which at last was thrown 
into the controversy between the two churches, and com- 
pleted the rupture. In the middle of the eleventh cen- 
tury the Patriarch was Michael Cerularius, a passionate 
hater of the Western Church. In the heat of his pas- 
sion against the Latins he accused them of this heresy. 
He closed every church of the Roman obedience in Con- 
stantinople. He joined the Metropolitan of Bulgaria in 
a violent assault on the Latin Church, especially for its 
continuance of this Jewish practice. Leo IX. remon- 
strated, and sent three legates to Constantinople to com- 
pose the quarrel. Neither party was in the temper for 
concession, or even for amity. On the 16th of July, 
1054, the legates went to St. Sophia, and laid on the high 
altar a sentence excommunicating Michael with all the 
proper anathemas, and shook the dust of Constantinople 
from their feet. What was given was returned in good 
measure ; the two churches consigned each other to per- 
dition, and this was the erd of all communion between 
them. The Crusades widened the breach, for if the Lat- 
ins had good reason for despising the Greeks, the East 
had even better reason for hating the West. If the one 
seemed weak and cunning, the other was barbarous and 
overbearing. Sometimes, in their straits, the Emperors 
wanted help from the AVest, and then sought reunion, but 
it never came. Their subjects refused to surrender. In 
1439 the Emperor, the Patriarch, and some seven hun- 
dred Greeks and Orientals appeared at the Council of 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 121 

Ferrara, wliicb had been adjourned to Florence. An 
agreement was made, and signed by the Pope, the Em- 
peror, the cardinals, patriarchs, and bishops. But on 
their return the clergy and people in the East repudiated 
it, and in fifteen years Constantinople fell into the hands 
of the Moslems, with no trace of the reconciliation left. 

Before the Ottoman came from the East, the Crusaders 
came from the AYest, and Constantinople suffered its first 
conquest from the Latins instead of the Mahometans. 
Innocent III. started the fifth crusade, but with a crafty 
eye for its own advantage, Venice turned it aside from 
Jerusalem to Constantinople, and its chief result was, not 
the rescue of the Holy Land, but the capture and subju- 
gation of the great Christian capital of the East, and the 
substitution of a Latin for a Greek Empire for almost 
sixty years. The proud city of Constantine and Justin- 
ian, of Chrysostom and Basil, now the outpost of Chris- 
tian civilization in the East, was besieged, humiliated, 
plundered, by a set of buccaneers who professed to be the 
special champions of the Cross and the defenders of Chris- 
tendom. A Flemish King, a Venetian Patriarch, even 
the Roman Pontiff, displaced all Byzantine authority, 
and the farce of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was 
repeated on the banks of the Bosphorus. But it ended 
as it begun. It had no right to be, and it could not last. 
Six Latin emperors kept it on its feet for fifty-seven years. 
But as it had no foundation in justice, so it was of no ad- 
vantage to either East or West, unless perhaps to Venice, 
which had a commercial eye to whatever was to its own 
benefit. AVhere the Franks demolished, the Venetians 
preferred to steal. The bronze horses, which Constantine 
carried from Rome to his new city, the old Doge Dandolo 
set up over the portals- of St. Mark's, where they still 
stand. What was carried away was nothing to what was 
shattered and burned. The cruel intolerance of the Franks 
provoked the bitter hatred of the Greeks ; the dream of 



122 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

Innocent to recover the East from its alienation was de- 
feated by the verj crusade which he expected would ac- 
complish it ; and the chasm between the two churches 
became impassable, apparently never to be bridged. The 
city never recovered from the ravage, or from the govern- 
ment nearly as injurious, of the Franks. Says Dean Mil- 
man : ^ " Venice, after the conquest of Constantinople, 
became a half Byzantine city. Her great Church of St. 
Mark still seems as if it had migrated from the East ; its 
walls glow with Byzantine mosaic ; its treasures are Ori- 
ental in their character as in their splendor." 

The Latin Empire passed and the Byzantine returned. 
The Isaurian, the Macedonian, and the Comnenan dynas- 
ties, which preceded it through nearly five centuries, had 
many great names, and Emperors who kept up the life 
and splendor of the old Empire. Now it fell into the 
hands of the Palseologi, and became but a pale shadow of 
what it had been, and was ready to fade away. It was 
reduced within, and crowded on all sides. Venice and 
Genoa had become the rivals of Constantinople in com- 
merce, in wealth, in maritime power. The Ottoman 
Turks were conquering the East and menacing Europe. 
Only Timour and his Tartars postponed for a time their 
conquest of the Empire and the capture of Constantino- 
ple. While the Empire was failing, the Church had gained 
by the conversion of Bulgaria [868-900] and Russia 
[988] in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Roman 
Church took the Teutonic tribes in the West, while the 
Slavs in the East fell to the Greek Church, and have be- 
come in the course of centuries, and with the death of the 
Byzantine Empire, the source of its strength and growth. 
Russia, covering half of Europe and the whole north of 
Asia, with a population of ninety millions, took its Chris- 
tianity from Constantinople, and, with an ecclesiastical 
head of its own, acknowledged by three quarters of its 
^ Latin Christianity, v. 373. 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 123 

people, still holds the doctrines and ritual of the Greek 
Church. In the cathedral at Moscow goes on the same 
splendid ceremonial of worshi23 which in the beginning- 
overpowered the imagination of Vladimir's ambassadors, 
under the dome of St. Sophia, and to-day the Eastern 
Church has a wider dominion and a larger constituency 
than in the days of Basil, or even of Justinian. But while 
the Church survived, the Empire perished. It endured 
through a wasting paralysis of nearly two hundred years. 
The ravens were watching for their prey. For a hundred 
years the Ottoman Turks were in Europe waiting for the 
chance to capture Constantinople. The city of Constan- 
tine, a Christian metropolis from the start, was destined 
to pass, not to some Christian power like Russia or Bul- 
garia, not to the Holy Roman Empire of the West, not 
to the Saracens, who had carried a brilliant civilization 
with their arms from Bagdad to Cordova, but to the Otto- 
man Turks, who could bring to it only the civilization of 
Asiatic barbarians, and the religion of Mahomet. Their 
janissaries, and their cannon, with their bravery and their 
determination, were too much for the feeble Greeks, who 
had scarcely any empire to fight for, and could no longer 
hold their city with their mercenary troops. The last of 
the Constantines, when he could do no more, fell sword in 
hand, and on the 29th of May, 1453, Mahomet II. marched 
into the city of the Christian Caesars. 

A Sultan took their throne : the crescent took the place 
of the cross on the dome of St. Sophia, and, to the sorrow 
if not the shame of Christendom, the Turk rules in Con- 
stantinople as well as in Jerusalem. For eleven centuries 
and nearly a quarter it stood, as it begun, a Christian city. 
For four centuries and more than a third, the alien has oc- 
cupied its palaces, and Antichrist has turned its churches 
into mosques. Nature has its old charm, and the position 
its perpetual value : the same wide reaches of blue water, 
the same temperate airs, the same bright, soft sky, the 



12-i CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

same hills with their olives and cypresses, the snowy 
Olympus still gleaming in the distance, the great seas 
finding their ways out and in by its walls. It might 
again be restored to Christendom, and its long eclipse 
pass away But who is to be the new Constantine to 
recover its lost destiny, the new Justinian to purify St. 
Sophia, the new Belisarius to expel the Turks, and unite 
the Slavs, and give the old Christian capital to a new 
Christian Empire, is hidden yet in the unopened leaves of 
the sibyl's book. It is now only the city of the Sultans, sev- 
ered from its ancient history, waiting for such new destiny 
as may come to it in the new distributions of empire, and 
when the great powers of Europe can agree to whom it 
shall fall. The old Rome has become the head of a new 
Italy for which it waited. The new Rome waits for its 
empire, which maybe Greek or may be Slav; it cannot be 
Turk. That it has a future is as sure as its superb posi- 
tion, or that the Turk does not belong in Europe. Says 
Mr. Bryce : " Other famous cities have played their part, 
and the curtain has dropped upon them ; empire and 
commerce, religion and letters and art, have sought new 
seats. But the city of two continents must remain pros- 
perous and great when St. Petersburg and Berlin may 
have become even as Augsburg or Toledo, and imperial 
Rome herself have shrunk to a museum of antiquities." ^ 
Constantinople once meant the Eastern Empire and the 
Eastern Church. Now it means neither. The Empire is 
gone. The Church remains, but not in the city of Con- 
stantine. It is not even Greek, as it once was. It is 
Sclavonic chiefly, though that has not altered its doctrine 
or its organization, any more than Rome lost itself in the 
Teutonic tribes it converted. Eastern, Byzantine, Greek 
as distinct from Latin and Western, whether Catholic or 
Protestant, the old type of Christianity contiimes. For 
this is one characteristic of the Eastern Church, that it is 
"^ Lecturr. at Aberdeen. 1878. 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 125 

conservative and unchanging. It partakes of the immo- 
bility of the East. It has stood by itself, not only strug- 
gling with Mahometanism, but in antagonism with the 
Western Church, maintaining its traditional orthodoxy, 
and takino" no streno'th from communication with the rest 
of the world. Its isolation has kept it stationary. From 
the beginning it was a creature of the State, of a despotic 
government, and never learned to exert itself for its own 
support. It was never a free, self-acting church. It has 
never been a missionary church. It has had no Hilde- 
brand, no Luther, no Loyola, no Council of Trent. Its 
worship is antique and unaesthetic, a strange combination 
of " barbaric rudeness and elaborate ceremonialism." No 
Sistine Madonna, no Descent from the Cross, no Martyr- 
dom of St. Peter, shines over any of its altars. Its monks 
have been only monks, not learned like the Benedictines, 
not missionary and preaching like the Mendicants, but 
simple recluses from the world. Monasticism became 
active and practical in the West, but has remained con- 
templative and eremite in the East. The West never had 
a Simeon Stylites. The pillar saint is a birth of the East. 
The monastic system of the Eastern Church has hardly 
altered since the time of St. Basil. Unlike the Latin 
Church, the Greek Church has a married clergy, and gives 
far more independence and consequence to the laity. It 
has no infallible Pope. It allows the Scriptures in the 
vulgar tongue, and in general it has not been a persecut- 
ing Church,^ close as it clings to its ancient creeds, and 
stiffly as it avows its exclusive orthodoxy. The fortunes 
of the Eastern Church are no longer bound up wdth the 
destiny of Constantinople. The Papacy has no historic 
or logical home but Rome, and it is doubtful if it could 
retain its vitality, perhaps even its existence, if exjDatri- 
ated, whatever the fate of the Roman Church. But the 
nationalism, what we may call the Gallicanism, of the 
^ Stanley, Eastern Church, 122. 



126 CITIES OF OUR FAITH. 

Eastern Churches, has made them independent of person 
or of place, of a hereditary patriarch or capital. The city 
of the Sultan will pass into the hands of some Christian 
power, — Russian, Austrian, Greek, Sclavonic, — or be- 
come a free city, an emporium of the world's commerce, 
with no political allegiance, but its authority as one of 
the two great capitals of the Christian world is not likely 
to be restored. 

The dome of St. Sophia may once more cover a Chris- 
tian worship, the Turk may recross the Bosphorus never 
to return, but the Constantinople of the past, of eleven 
centuries of Christian history, unless by some strange rev- 
olution in the historic order, will not come back. What- 
ever its future, brighten it as we may with all Christian 
hopes, it is the old, the vanished, the buried Constanti- 
nople, with its finished mission, with its mingled splendor 
and shame, with its spiritual power transferred to new 
centres, a monument like Jerusalem and Alexandria, and 
only that, which we can place among the capital cities of 
the Christian faith. 



HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME.^ 

It is the history hanging over the Italian cities which 
gives many of them their peculiar attraction to the trav- 
eler. They are sought for the sake of what has been, and 
imagination recreates in them the Past, which may have 
left few tangible relics, but which, nevertheless, overshad- 
ows all present glory. They are filled with a population 
of shadows and memories, of great figures and stately 
names, of emperors and prelates, of writers and warriors, 
emerging from the dim history in which they have been 
living, and bringing with them something of the life of the 
ancient time. In Ravenna, the Roman Csesar, the Gothic 
King, the Greek Exarch, kept their state ; there begun, 
in the gift of Pepin and Charlemagne, the power of the 
Pope as a temporal prince, which has expired under our 
own eyes ; and there is the mausoleum of the daughter of 
the great Theodosius, and the tomb of Dante, sleeping far 
from his ungrateful Florence. The shrunk and desolate 
Ferrara once had the most splendid court in Europe ; 
there is the house of Ariosto, and the prison of Tasso ; it 
was the retreat of Calvin, and the birthplace of Olympia 
Morata. Wandering into Milan, in the end of the last 
summer, drawn and enchanted by its great cathedral, I 
found rising before me constantly the stately figure of her 
great bishop and saint, whose presence, memory, and name 

^ PubHshed in the Baptist Quarterly, vol. vii. 

Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis Episcopi Opera, ad manuscriptos co- 
dices Vaticanos, Gallicanos, Belgicos, etc., nec-non ad editioues vete- 
res emendata, studio et labore monachorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, e 
Congregatione S. Mauri. Tomus Primus, Parisiis : MDCLXXX VI. ; 
Tomus Secundus, MDCXC. 
9 



130 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

are still greater than anything in her history. It sug- 
gested a slight study of Ambrose and his time. 

He was the great ecclesiastic of his time. Chrysostom 
surpassed him as an orator. Jerome had more learning. 
Augustine was the greater theologian. Athanasius was a 
profounder dogmatist, and stood as courageously for his 
episcopal right against imperial aggression. But in Am- 
brose sacerdotal authority first asserted itself with the 
Spirit of Hildebrand, and as Archbishop of Milan he as- 
sumed a power which the Bishop of Rome had not yet 
dared to exercise. He asserted it under feeble emperors, 
but he maintained it against the mightiest. It was moral 
ascendancy as much as priestly prerogative. It was the 
claim for the Church of moral dominion, of spiritual su- 
premacy, by one who was a Roman before he was a Chris- 
tian, and who brought over into the new world which was 
rising out of the wreck of religion and empire, something 
of the old Roman virtue, — the stern, conscientious, impe- 
rious spirit of the undegraded, unconquered mistress of 
the world. 

It was that greatest period in human history, when 
Rome, when Europe, was changing its religion. The cap- 
ital, conquering, imperial civilization of the world was 
passing from Paganism to Christianity. The causes of 
that wonderful change, of that great religious revolution, 
have been much discussed. They lie primarily in the re- 
ligion itself, in moral, vital forces strong enough for con- 
quest. Nothing explains the triumph of Christianity but 
itself. Paganism was worn out, and ready to die. In the 
end of the fourth century, and during the episcopate of 
Ambrose, it received its coup de grace. In the beginning 
of the century Constantine had gathered the powers of the 
Empire into his single hand, and elevated Christianity to 
the throne. At the end of it Theodosius had abolished, 
by law, the old religion, which had been identified with 
the great periods, the mighty growth of Rome, which was 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 131 

dying with her decay, and only waited the coming of 
Alaric to be buried in the ruins of the Empire itself. 

It was also the period of the great conflict in the bosom 
of the Church between the doctrines of Arius and Atha- 
nasius, which was to terminate in its consolidation under 
one rigorous and unbending creed. For a time Arianism 
maintained itself with vigor, though condemned by the 
great Council at Nicsea, and bishops and emperors were 
its defenders. The end of the fourth century saw its sup- 
pression by the same hand which was put to the abolition 
of Paganism. Theodosius had determined on the unity as 
well as the triumph of Christianity. His edicts went forth 
against heretics as well as pagans. His first act, in con- 
junction with Gratian and Valentinian II., the two other 
emperors, was to enjoin the universal acceptance of the 
orthodox catholic faith. " Thus," says Dean Milman, 
'' the religion of the whole Eoman world was enacted by 
two feeble boys and a rude Spanish soldier." ^ 

It was in the midst of this conflict, and apparently in 
consequence of it, that Ambrose at a leap, or rather — for 
it was against his own resistance — by a sudden explosion 
of popular feeling, rose at once into the archbishopric. 
He was a young man, in the thirty-fourth year of his age. 
His father had held the post of pretorian prefect in Gaul, 
where the son was born. He had been educated at Kome 
for the public service, and in the course of civil promotion 
had been appointed prefect of the ^milian and Ligurian 
Provinces in Northern Italy. His appointment came from 
the Emperor, but he received his instructions from Pro- 
bus, the Prefect of Italy, who, to guard him against the 
severity common with the Roman magistrates, charged 
him to rule his province " not as a judge, but as a bishop." 
The words of his patron and friend, who was a Christian, 
the event turned into a sort of unintended prophecy. The 
prestige of E-ome, as the capital of the Empire, had long 
^ History of Christianity, iii. 101. 



132 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

before declined, as conquest was extended, and as lUyrians 
or Spaniards, who perhaps had never seen the metropolis, 
took the purple. Diocletian and Maximian established 
their residence in the provinces. Milan became the vir- 
tual capital of the Western Empire, and. Gibbon says, 
" assumed the splendor of an imperial city." ^ The Bishop 
of Milan was metropolitan of a considerable portion of the 
present Lombardy. For twenty years Auxentius, an 
Arian, had held the primacy against many efforts to dis- 
place him. At his death, the bishops made a vain attempt 
to induce the Emperor Yalentinian to name a successor. 
The choice was remitted to them, and also to the people 
of Milan, who at that time seemed to have had a voice in 
the election. The contest between the Arian and Athana- 
sian parties was violent, and threatened to break out in 
sedition. This called for the interposition of Ambrose, as 
the civil governor of the province, who proceeded to the 
Basilica, that by his presence and words he might allay 
the tumult. His address had an unanticipated result. A 
child, as Paulinus ^ tells the story, " perhaps so instructed," 
Neander suggests, cried out, " Ambrose for Bishop ! " This 
apparently accidental nomination was taken up by a gen- 
eral acclamation of the whole assembly, and both parties 
joined in the spontaneous and unanimous election. 

The surprised and reluctant magistrate tried in vain to 
evade an office for which he had no special preparation, 
and to which he felt no divine call. He was but a cate- 
chumen, not yet having received baptism. He is said to 

1 Decline and Fall, chap. xiii. 4. 

2 Paulinus was a deacon and notary under Ambrose, and wrote a 
brief and superficial memoir of his life, addressed to St. Augustine. 
It has the merit of contemporary knowledge. It is printed by Gers- 
dorf. Bibliotheca Patrum, viii. The Benedictine editors have also 
inserted it in an Appendix, together with a memoir of their own. 
Opera, ii. 2-63. Tillemont gives ninety-five chapters to the Arch- 
bishop, and has been the chief source of information for the prep- 
aration of this article. Memoires Ecclesiastiques, x. 78-306. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 133 

have adopted some singular devices, such as the assump- 
tion of unusual cruelty in his magistracy, the introduc- 
tion of lewd women into his house, to create imputations 
against his chastity, and flight from the city by night, only 
to find that he had lost his way and was back at another 
gate in the morning, in order to divert from himself the 
popular feeling, and to escape the office. Yalentinian, the 
Emperor, threw his weight into the scale, and Ambrose 
consented. The 30th of November was long observed in 
the Church of Milan as the day of his baptism. A week 
after, on the 7th of December, he was ordained. It was 
a singular election, and to us, at this distant time, and 
trained in the usages of the primitive Church of the New 
Testament, seems almost incredible. The Church had 
traveled far from its original simplicity and unworldliness 
when it could even allow, much more invite, a civilian, the 
first civil officer of the country, unbaptized, perhaps un- 
converted, certainly untaught and untried in any religious 
function, to step into the highest ecclesiastical post, and 
surrender itself to his keeping. The event justified the 
choice ; but there were no assurances beforehand, as far 
as we can see, that it might not have quite another issue. 
It was committing to accident, it was intrusting to uncer- 
tain hands, it was even offering to worldly power an office 
most sacred, and which, theoretically at least, required the 
previous interposition of the Holy Ghost. But it illus- 
trates the freedom, the unrestrained mingling of lay with 
clerical power, the influence of the people, and even of 
popular impulses, in the most important ecclesiastical elec- 
tions, even at so late a period. Above all, it shows that 
at the end of the fourth century, as was the case long 
after, the Bishop of Rome had no voice in episcopal ap- 
pointments, and that the See of Milan was as independent 
as that of Rome itself. There is the voice of the people, 
the clergy, the Emperor, but not the whisper of a Pope. 
Though elected, by both parties, he at once declared 



134 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

against Arianism by demanding baptism of an orthodox 
bishop. He renounced the pomps of his civil state, and 
assumed an austere simplicity of living. He gave his own 
estates to the Church and to the poor. And he devoted the 
wealth of the Church, he even sold the consecrated plate, 
for the redemption of captives. He said, as if the spirit 
of humanity were superior to any ecclesiastical zeal, " The 
Church possesses gold, not to treasure up, but to distribute 
it for the welfare and happiness of men. The blood of 
redemption which has gleamed in those golden cups has 
sanctified them, not for the service alone, but for the re- 
demption of man." He at once commenced theological 
studies, and placed himself under the tuition of Simpli- 
cian, who became his successor in the archbishopric. But 
he never made any mark in theology. Dean Milman re- 
marks : " The most curious fact relating to Ambrose is the 
extraordinary contrast between his vigorous, practical, and 
statesmanlike character as a man, as well as that of such 
among his writings as may be called public and popular, 
and the mystic subtlety which fills most of his theological 
works." ^ But without early theological training, his im- 
agination flew to allegory as the easiest interpretation 
of Scripture. His judgment was exhausted in the disci- 
pline of the Church, while his fancy took free flight in the 
realm of theology, stimulated without doubt by his fond- 
ness for the writings of Origen. 

It was in the midst of the conflict of Christianity with 
expiring Paganism, and of orthodoxy with waning and 
retreating Arianism, that Ambrose undertook the admin- 
istration of the Church in this metropolis of the Western 
Empire. Paganism had long been doomed, for it was mor- 
ally undermined, and the faith in it, satisfaction in it, had 
gone beyond restoration. But still it had a political ex- 
istence. It had its memories dear to Roman pride, its 
structures, its ceremonials, its priesthood. It stood by 
1 History of Christianity, iii. 159, note. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 135 

sufferance at least. The Emperor still held the dignity 
and wore the robes of Supreme Pontiff, although he were 
a Christian. As a matter of course he was chief of the 
religion as well as of the state. But he had ceased to re- 
side at Rome. He was a stranger to the influences and 
associations which inspired the Roman aristocracy with 
regret, if not reverence, for the declining faith and its an- 
cient glories. But Gratian soon showed that he had come 
under the control of a more masculine mind than his own, 
and which would give Paganism no quarter. He was but 
a youth, good without strength, easy and irresolute. The 
Senate sent to him a deputation for the purpose of invest- 
ing him with the dignities of the Pontificate. But he 
spurned the idolatrous honor. If Rome was shocked by 
such an ominous assault on its venerable religion, it saw 
with alarm and indignation the statue and altar of Victory, 
which had stood in the Senate House and presided over its 
deliberations from the earliest times and through the peri- 
ods of conquest and glory, where Senators took their oaths, 
and a daily libation was offered as a prelude to their pub- 
lic proceedings, now cast out by imperial decree. Four 
times the Senate, by deputations to the imperial court, 
solicited its restoration. The first, Gratian refused even 
to receive. The second made its appeal to his successor, 
Valentinian, and it is here that Ambrose appears openly 
to share in the conflict. Symmachus was a person of the 
highest character and dignity. He was a senator of great 
learning and wealth, and with the honor of being pontiff 
and augur he joined the civic offices of Proconsul of Af- 
rica and Prefect of Rome. To him was intrusted the 
preparation of a petition to the Emperor. It was drawn 
with the skill of a master of rhetoric. The conscious 
weakness of a failing cause betrays itself in the apologetic 
tone, in the elaborate caution against giving offense, in the 
spirit of conciliation and entreaty so much in contrast with 
the temper of the religion which a century before was 



136 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

smiting Christianity with the bloody hand of Diocletian. 
He pleads for a religion which has stood the trial and re- 
ceived the sanction of ages ; which may be allowed to stand 
for the good it has done ; and which, in the uncertainties 
of human inquiry and the diversities of human belief, has 
the advantage of custom and of past blessing on its side. 
He brings Rome, the once mighty, irresistible Rome, to 
speak in such tones as these : — 

Most excellent princes, fathers of your country, respect my 
years, and permit me still to practice the religion of my ances- 
tors, in which I have grown old. Grant me but the liberty of 
living according to my ancient usage. This religion has sub- 
dued the world to my dominion ; these rites repelled Hannibal 
from my walls, the Gauls from the Capitol. Have I lived thus 
long to be rebuked in my old age for my religion ? It is too 
late ; it would be discreditable to amend in my old age. I en- 
treat but peace for the gods of Rome, the tutelary divinities of 
our country. 

But the alert and resolute Ambrose would not allow the 
youthful Emperor to be drawn into any concession by the 
eloquence of the Pagan apologist. He at once wrote an 
earnest letter of caution to Valentinian. He then drew 
up a formal reply to the argument of Symmachus. So 
great a Latinist as Heyne gives the palm of superiority to 
the Prefect over the Bishop. The apologist may be more 
dexterous, more elegant, more careful. The Bishop is 
more careless, more impetuous, more confident, more fer- 
vid. He has to condemn, not to conciliate. He is to 
carry his point, not by artifices of rhetoric, but by ardor of 
conviction. And so he carries the spirit of his action into 
his style. He is not a suppliant entreating. He is a 
priest commissioned to instruct with divine authority. He 
warned the Emperor not to be deceived by names, nor to 
be led astray by his political advisers. He says : — 

He who advises, and he who decrees such concessions, sacri- 
fices to idols. We, bishops, could not quietly tolerate this. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 137 

You might come to the Church, but you would find there no 
priest, or a priest who would forbid your approach. The Church 
will indignantly reject the gifts of him who has shared them 
with heathen temples. The altar of Christ disdains your offer- 
ings, since you have erected an altar to idols ; for your word, 
your hand, your signature, are your works. It is written, Ye 
cannot serve two masters. 

He not only brandishes the terrors of priestly authority, 
he pours derision and contempt on the venerable tradi- 
tions, the impotent gods of Rome : — 

Where were the gods, in all the defeats, some of them but 
recent, of the Pagan emperors ? Was not the altar of Victory 
then standing ? And who is this deity ? Victory is a gift, not 
a power ; she depends on the courage of the legions, not on the 
influence of the religion ; a mighty deity that depends on the 
numbers of an army, or the doubtful issue of a battle ! 

The victory was with the Ecclesiastic rather than the 
civilian, and the Emperor did not yield. Twice again the 
Senate supplicated the Emperor in vain. " The fair hu- 
manities of old religion " had not only, according to the 
expression of Coleridge, " vanished from the faith of rea- 
son." The ancient gods fell not only before the argu- 
ments of Ambrose ; they could not stand before the con- 
quering arms of Theodosius. The Emperor of the East 
became the Emperor of the West, and the trembling tem- 
ple of Paganism went down at his coming. The Senate 
at his instigation debated the claims of Jupiter and of 
Christ ; and, without doubt under his inspiration, Jupiter 
was outvoted. The tenants leave a falling house ; and 
according to Prudentius, six hundred Roman families at 
once deserted their ancestral religion, and passed to the 
Christian side. The Pagan worship was no longer allowed 
support out of the public funds, and before Ambrose died 
the religion of Numa, which had lasted eleven hundred 
years, was but a vanishing shadow, and its priesthood, its 
flamens, and vestals had been turned out to starve. 



138 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

In the conflict of hostile creeds, Ambrose had a formid- 
able enemy to encounter, and the opportunity to assert 
his hierarchical prerogative in a bold and victorious style. 
The Empress Justin a, the widow of the first and the 
mother of the second Valentinian, was an Arian, and a 
determined one. During her son's minority she had great 
power in the government, and she used it to force Arian- 
ism into the Church, and thus provoked the Archbishop of 
Milan to defiance and resistance. She had employed him, 
indeed, on a difficult and most important political service. 
After the murder of Gratian he had been dispatched to 
Gaul to negotiate with Maximus, who had assumed the pur- 
ple and was now menacing Italy with invasion. Either 
by his skill as an ambassador, or his authority as a prelate, 
he checked for a time the ambition of the invader, and 
secured the peace of Italy. But this service softened nei- 
ther the purpose of the Empress nor the orthodoxy of the 
Bishop. They were first brought into collision by what 
seems to have been a stretch of ecclesiastical zeal on the 
part of the resolute Ambrose. The bishopric of Sir- 
mium in Illyria, which had been filled by an Arian, was 
vacant, and Justina, who was there, used her influence to 
secure the succession in the same party. But Ambrose, 
though it was beyond the limits of his diocese, appeared 
in the city, and in the face of the empress-mother brought 
about the election of an orthodox bishop. This was only 
premonitory of a closer and sharper conflict. On the 
approach of Easter, in the spring of 385, Justina, in the 
name of the Emperor, demanded the use of one of the 
churches of Milan for the celebration of the Arian ser- 
vice. At first she asked for the Portian Basilica, now the 
Church of San Vittore al Corpo, without the walls. The 
next demand was for the new and larger Basilica, which 
Tillemont ^ thinks was the church founded by Ambrose in 
382 on the site of the present San Nazaro Maggiore. A 
contest began which was carried on through the Holy 
^ Histoire Ecc, x. 167. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 139 

Week, and in which the inflexible firmness and courage 
of the Bishop won the victory. He was summoned before 
the Imperial Council. An impetuous crowd followed him, 
alarmed for his safety, and dashed against the gates of 
the palace, till the affrighted ministers begged him to 
interpose for the protection of the Emperor and the peace 
of the city. The government attempted to take forcible 
possession of the Basilica, which only raised a tumult 
which the Bishop was commanded to allay. He an- 
swered that he had not stirred up the people, and God 
only could still them. The soldiers entered the church 
where Ambrose was conducting the worship. But they 
fell on their knees, and assured him that they had come 
to pray, not to do violence. He went into the pulpit to 
preach on the Book of Job. And as he spoke of the wife 
of the patriarch urging him to blaspheme the name of 
God, of Eve, of Jezebel, of Herodias, the application was 
not difficult to make. Again and again the Council sent 
to him to give up the Basilica, and he, with persistent 
firmness, declared the inviolability of the church, and that 
the Bishop cannot alienate the temple of God. He further 
said that if the Emperor had no right over a private 
house, much less had he over the house of God. They 
said : " Everything is permitted to the Emperor." He 
replied, "That his right did not extend to that which be- 
longed to the Most High." They said, " Surely the Em- 
peror ought to have a church to worship in." He answered, 
" What has the Emperor to do with an adulteress, the 
church * of heretics?" The secretary of the Emperor 
came. " The Emperor wishes to know," he said, " why 
you raise yourself to be a tyrant." He replied, " If I am 
a tyrant, why not punish me with death? The tyranny of 
a bishop is in his feebleness. Maximus did not think I 
was the tyrant of Yalentinian when I prevented his com- 
ing into Italy. Priests have bestowed empire ; they never 
condescend to assume it." The Emperor himself was 



140 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

urged to confront the Bishop. The young man answered, 
" His eloquence would compel you to give me up to his 
power." There was nothing to be done with the refrac- 
tory priest. The triumph was with him. The Empress 
was obliged to yield, or to postpone her purpose and her 
revenge. She tried again, and again it was Ambrose who 
conquered. He was sentenced to exile ; he refused to go, 
and the people would not let him go. And at last he 
found, or Heaven found for him, the means of finishing 
the contest. 

It was during its progress, according to Augustine, that 
Ambrose first introduced the antiphonal singing to relieve 
the vigils of the people. " Then it was first instituted 
that, after the manner of the Eastern churches, hymns 
and psalms should be sung, lest the people should wax 
faint through the tediousness of sorrow," ^ It was closed 
at last by what was counted divine interposition. The 
people were already with Ambrose. His character, his 
eloquence, his benevolence, and his very firmness and 
courage, the awful assertion of an authority higher than 
the Emperor's, carried captive the popular mind. It was 
a time of high religious excitement among a people who 
were the ancestors of the impressionable, ardent Italians 
of to-day. They were ready to invest the champion of his 
order, of the Catholic faith, of the contending Church, 
with even supernatural power. And he ministered to 
their enthusiasm, and at least made use of their credulity. 
By some strong presentiment, in a vision, as Augustine,^ 
who was then in Milan, says, the Bishop was directed to 
a spot where the remains of two martyrs, SS. Gervasius 
and Protasius, had been buried for three hundred years. 
They were of gigantic proportions, their heads severed 
from the body, and the tomb filled with blood. The relics 
were conveyed with pompous ceremonial to the Ambro- 
sian Church, which he dedicated to them, but upon which 
^ Confessions, ix. 7. ^ Tillemoiit, x. 183. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 141 

posterity has placed his own more illustrious name. A 
healing power went out from them ; a blind man recov- 
ered his sight, and the wonder kindled the enthusiasm of 
an excitable people. It was not in human nature, not in 
ecclesiastical human nature at any rate, not to avail itself 
of such a fortunate occasion to fortify the persecuted 
Bishop in his conflict with heretic power. The Arian Em- 
press and her adherents w^ere incredulous. But the peo- 
ple believed, and it was not for a boy of sixteen, though 
he were sovereign of Italy, to stand against a Bishop 
clothed with such sanctit}^, and crowned with such honors 
from above. Opposition was swept away before the en- 
thusiasm which had been so wonderfully, if not so skil- 
fully, enlisted. The altar was mightier than the throne. 

And now it is that his life comes into relation with the 
two great men of his age. His connection with Augus- 
tine may have been brief, his influence not profound, and 
yet at a critical period it was decisive. It was in the year 
383, when he was twenty-nine years old, that Augustine 
came to Milan. He had run a wild career of mingled 
passion and study, of spiritual dreaming, of religious 
yearning, of philosophical speculation. This irregular 
development of a powerful mind was about to issue in the 
repose, or at least the confidence, of a settled faith and of 
a devout life. He came under the influence of Ambrose, 
and W'as moved by his eloquence. He came into deeper 
and spiritual sympathy with the writings of St. Paul, 
and exchanged the Hortensius of Cicero for the Epistle 
to the Romans. Through throes of spiritual agony he 
came into the kingdom of Heaven. By the hand of Am- 
brose he was baptized, and led into that Church whose 
doctrine he has moulded, if he has not shaped its fortunes, 
as perhaps no other single mind has done. His example 
is less historic and commanding, his bishopric less conspic- 
uous ; but as ideas in the long run rule the world, it is the 
fervid and profound theologian, rather than the courage- 



142 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

ous and imperious churchman, the catechumen rather 
than the preacher in the Ambrosian Basilica, whose sceptre 
is longest, and who is still Bishop over almost the Church 
Universal. 

Theodosius was now the real master of the Roman 
world. His sword had rescued the West from the power 
of Maximus, and his generosity had restored and secured 
the trembling throne of Yalentinian. The potent offices 
of Ambrose had been invoked a second time for the pro- 
tection of the young and feeble Emperor, and to check 
the progress of the usurper, even in the midst of his sharp 
feud with the heretic Empress. She lived to see the tri- 
umph of the great Emperor who had married her daugh- 
ter and rescued her son. But she died soon, and with 
her died the Arianism of Yalentinian, and the hopes of 
its party. For three years he was in Italy, much of it 
in Milan, under the eye of its Archbishop. Before, Am- 
brose had been contending with a weak Emperor and 
against heresy. He has now to meet a Caesar worthy of 
the great days of the Empire, who is a Catholic not to 
contend with so much as to control. And with the weak 
and the mighty alike he asserts the supremacy of the 
Church and the authority of the priesthood. The con- 
queror, the ruler of the world, in the height of his power, 
finds at Milan, if nowhere else, a tribunal to which he 
must bow, a person before whose rebuke he quails. The 
Christians in Callinicum had burned a Jewish synagogue, 
it was said, by the advice of their Bishop. Some monks, 
incensed by an interruption of one of their processions in 
tbe road, burned a church belonging to some Yalentinian 
Gnostics. The Emperor, with such ideas of justice as 
would be tolerably obvious to the lay mind, ordered that 
the Bishop rebuild the synagogue, and that the rioters 
should make fair compensation fo the heretics for their 
loss. This was far beyond the diocese of Ambrose, and 
he himself was off at Aquileia, at the head of the Adri- 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 143 

atic. But lie felt that hj his position he was the cham- 
pion of the true faith wherever menaced. He wrote to 
the Emperor, vindicating the Bishop. If the Bishop 
complied with the imperial mandate he would be an apos- 
tate, and the Emperor would be responsible. It was only 
repaying in kind what the orthodox had suffered at the 
hands of Jews and heretics. But the letter failed of its 
purpose. Ambrose returned to Milan and renewed his 
charge in the church, refusing to proceed with the mass 
till the Emperor yielded and granted lenity to the offenders. 
But we are now to see the bold prelate taking a still 
loftier attitude, vindicating outraged justice, and bringing 
the loftiest head in Europe to bow before the altar in hum- 
ble and penitent confession. In a thousand years Rome 
had seen great crimes in the head of the state, had seen 
bloody deeds and intolerable despotism go unrebuked, had 
never seen the Emperor bow to a subject, and acknowl- 
edge in him a moral majesty greater than his own proud 
and unchallenged authority. But it is the last of the great 
Emperors, and the last at whose feet the whole Roman 
Empire bowed, who now bends subdued before a priest 
whom, a hundred years before, the Emperor Diocletian 
might have given to the headsman, or tossed to the lions 
in the Flavian amphitheatre. Theodosius was a man of 
many noble and manly virtues, and had often shown an 
imperial clemency and generosity. But he was quick in 
passion, and often broke into great tempests of anger. 
The people in Thessalonica had been affronted by Botheric, 
the king's lieutenant, and in an affray he, with several im- 
perial officers, was killed. Theodosius, notwithstanding 
all attempts to allay his resentment, resolved on secret 
and summary vengeance. While the whole population 
was gathered in the circus, a signal was given to the troops 
secretly posted round it, and an indiscriminate and horri- 
ble massacre followed. For three hours the carnage went 
on, till the blood of seven thousand persons, strangers and 



144 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

natives, of all ages, of either sex, the guilty and the inno- 
cent, was shed in expiation of the offense. 

Ambrose heard of it, and, whether in terror or in grief, 
retired into the country to avoid the presence of the Em- 
peror. He sent him a letter expressing his horror at the 
crime in which he would be an accomplice if he kept si- 
lence. He exhorted him to penitence, and promised him 
his prayers. But he warned him not to come to the altar, 
for he would not communicate with a man stained with 
the blood of thousands of innocent people. For eight 
months the Emperor waited in seclusion, not daring to 
come to the church. The slave and the beggar could en- 
ter, but the sovereign of the world was shut out. This he 
felt, and through his minister sought of the prelate some 
relaxation of the hard sentence. But Ambrose answered 
that the Emperor might march over his dead body, he 
would not allow him to come into the church. At length 
the Emperor was allowed to enter one of the cloisters of 
the church, where he professed himself ready to submit to 
whatever Ambrose should prescribe. After some parley 
the Bishop consented to remove his interdict on two con- 
ditions : First, that he would issue an edict prohibiting 
the execution of capital punishment for thirty days after 
conviction, and that he should submit to public penance. 
The Emperor was not content to fall on his knees to re- 
ceive absolution. He prostrated himself on the pavement, 
tore his hair, struck his forehead and watered the ground 
with tears. It is but the anticipation in spirit of Henry 
lY., seven centuries later, imploring, in the snow at the 
gates of Canossa, the absolution of the prouder and might- 
ier Gregory. And so the conqueror of the world was con- 
quered, and confessed that there is a majesty greater than 
that of kings. Humanity and justice could look up and 
feel that they had found a friend, and a champion more 
than imperial. It was one of the great events, one of the 
sublimest pictures of history. It was the moral authority 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 145 

of Christianity holding in check arbitrary power, estab- 
lishing a tribunal which should protect the meanest and 
punish the mightiest. It was sacerdotal power, carrying 
in itself the latent peril of abuse for religious oppression 
and persecution, and yet exercising in pure hands a whole- 
some control over the insolence of irresponsible greatness, 
and the cruelty of despotic and intemperate passion. It 
was the gates of the same Portian Basilica, now the Church 
of San Vittore al Carpo, which the prelate had closed 
against the heretic Empress, which were also shut against 
the orthodox Emperor. One is still shown, at the Church 
of San Ambrogio, two panels of cypress wood, which are 
said to be parts of the ancient gates before which this im- 
mortal transaction happened. And one sees in the Belve- 
dere Gallery at Vienna the picture in which the masterly 
hand of Rubens has reproduced the great spectacle. 

Ambrose lived to pronounce the funeral orations over 
Valentinian and Theodosius. He refused to acknowledge 
the authority or receive the gifts of Eugenius. He retired 
from Milan till the conquering arms of Theodosius had 
reduced the East and West to his sway. The victorious 
Emperor came to Milan to finish the brief remainder of his 
days, commending his sons in his dying hours to the Arch- 
bishop, by whose moral influence he had been persuaded 
to abstain from the eucharist while his hands were stained 
with the blood of a war which his Christianity could not 
but justify. 

Not long after, in 397, on the 4th of April, in the fifty- 
seventh year of his age, after a service in the Church of 
twenty-three years, the good Bishop of the Milanese, the 
imperial ecclesiastic of his age, finished his days. Stil- 
icho, the great general, was then at Milan, and urged the 
people to send to the Bishop, asking him to offer his own 
more effective prayers for his recovery. He replied : " I 
have not so lived among you as to be ashamed to live. I 
have so good a Master that I am not afraid to die." For 

10 



146 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

five hours he held his hands crossed in the attitude of 
prayer, and so expired. His body is kept in the ancient 
basilica which bears his name. In the Duomo, the corpse 
of San Carlo Borromeo sleeps in a shrine of silver and 
crystal, dressed in gorgeous pontificals, and stared at by 
eyes curious or devout. But the shrine of Ambrose is the 
sanctity, the memory which, through fourteen centuries, 
has hung invisible round his grave. He has the rare and 
double honor of a place among the saints of the Eastern 
as well as of the Latin Church, — his name enrolled with 
Basil, Athanasius and the Gregories, as well as with Cyp- 
rian and Augustine. 

The works of Ambrose the Benedictines have collected 
in two folio volumes. It has already been intimated that 
he was a churchman rather than a theologian. He added 
something, perhaps, to the theology of his time, but noth- 
ing which is felt in the theology of to-day. He was infe- 
rior in intellectual power to Athanasius, Augustine, and 
Origen. He followed the Greek Fathers in his dogmatics, 
though laying more stress than they on the doctrines of 
sin and grace, anticipating in some measure the anthro- 
pology of Augustine.^ Half of his works, comprising the 
first volume, is devoted to exposition of the Scriptures. 
His interpretation is mainly allegorical, and of very little 
value. An exception may possibly be made in favor of his 
discourses on the Psalms, which are more earnest and prac- 
tical. The principal work in the second volume is a trea- 
tise "De Officiis Ministrorum," which is ethical rather than 
theological, and shows how much stronger he was in the 
sphere of morals than of theology. He, however, adopts 
the vicious distinction, current in his time, between perfect 
and imperfect moral obligation, placing virginity, fasting, 
poverty, among those " counsels of perfection " which be- 
long to a life strictly dedicated to religion. His sister, 
Marcellina, had taken in his early days the vow of perpet- 
1 Neancler, Church History, ii. 562. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 147 

ual virginity. And he not only yielded, but contributed 
to the mighty ascetic tendency coming in from the Eastern 
Church which developed monachism, and made it such a 
power for evil and for good in the coming ages. Six of 
the works in the second volume treat of the celibate state, 
and speak its praises. His works also include ninety-one 
letters, on various subjects, which illustrate the character 
of the man and the events of his life. 

The name of Ambrose is connected with a great im- 
provement in the church-music of the fifth and sixth cen- 
turies. Before his time, the music was a mere recitation 
of words, with a slight modulation of the voice, and a mo- 
notonous singing of prayers, performed entirely by the 
younger clergy. He introduced the musical scale of the 
Greeks, and their more melodious tunes. He also taught 
the practice of antiphonal chanting, as Augustine states,^ 
during his conflict with the Empress Justina. It soon 
spread through the Western Church, and held its place 
for two hundred years. At the end of the sixth century 
it was superseded throughout Italy by the richer Gregorian 
chant ; but in the Church of Milan it is still preserved 
with jealous pride. There, in the beginning, the ardent 
soul of Augustine was moved by its simple beauty, though 
his conscience was alarmed lest the delights of music 
should be a snare to his soul.^ " How did I weep," he 

^ " It was a year, or not much more, that Justina, mother to the 
Emperor Valentinian, a child, persecuted thy servant Ambrose, in 
favor of her heresy, to which she was seduced by the Arians. The 
devout people kept watch in the Church, ready to die with the Bishop, 
thy servant. Then it was first instituted that, after the manner of the 
Eastern Churches, hymns and psalms should be sung, lest the people 
should wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow ; and from that 
day to this the custom is retained, divers, yea, almost all thy congre- 
gations, throughout other parts of the world, following herein." — 
Confessions, ix. 1. 

- " At other times, shunning over-anxiously this very deception, I 
err in too great strictness ; and sometimes to that degree as to wish 
the whole melody of sweet music, which is used to David's Psalter, 



148 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

says, " in thy hymns and canticles, touched to the quick 
by the voices of thy sweet-attuned Church ! The voices 
flowed into mine ears, and the truth distilled into my 
heart, whence the affections of my devotion overflowed, 
and tears ran down, and happy was I therein." ^ 

Ambrose, and with him Hilary of Poictiers, led the 
way in the composition of hymns for use in the worship 
of the Church. Neander states that the ancient usage had 
been to confine the singing to passages taken from the 
Scriptures, and that this improvement met considerable 
opposition.^ The Te Deum, whose stately strains have 
echoed through the churches of Christendom ever since, 
has been ascribed to the Bishop of Milan, and he proba- 
bly translated it from the Greek for the use of his choir. ^ 
Many hymns have been attributed to him which are not 
his. The Benedictines admit but twelve, and a recent 
writer, one of the Prefetti of the Ambrosian Library at 
Milan, Dom. Biraghi, whose learning is vouched for by 
Bishop Wordsworth, rejects five of these.* He, however, 
has added others, and, going beyond other authorities, 
admits eighteen hymns and four poems as genuine produc- 

banished from my ears, and the Church's too : and that mode seems 
to me safer, which I remember to have been often told me of Atha- 
nasius. Bishop of Alexandria, who made the reader of the Psalm utter 
it with so slight inflection of the voice that it was nearer speaking 
than singing. Yet, again, when I remember the tears I shed at the 
Psalmody of thy Church, in the beginning of my recovered faith, and 
how at this time I am moved, not with the singing, but with the 
things sung, when they are sung with a clear voice, and a modulation 
most suitable, I acknowledge the great use of this institution. •Thus 
I fluctuate between peril of pleasure and approved wholesomeness ; 
inclined the rather (though not as pronouncing an irrevocable opin- 
ion) to approve of the use of singing in the churches, that so by the 
delight of the ears the weaker minds may rise to the feeling of devo- 
tion." — Confessions^ x. 33, 

^ Confessions, ix. 6. ^ ^ Church History, ii. 318. 

3 Hevzog, Real-Encyclopddie, iii. art. "Ambrosius." 

* Journal of a Tour in Italy, i. 114. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 149 

tions of Ambrose. His hymns are vigorous, severe, dog- 
matic, objective. There is no tenderness of sentiment, 
and an austere simplicity of diction. They belonged to 
the time, and he made effective use of them. He says, in 
one of his letters : " Some complain that the people are 
led away by the singing of my hymns. I do not deny it. 
The singing is grand, and nothing can stand before it. 
What can be more tellinof than the confession of the Trin- 
ity in the mouth of the whole population, day by day ? " ^ 
Perhaps his grandest hymn is the '' Veni Redemj^tor Gen- 
tium," a translation of which Dr. Schaif has set at the 
head of his excellent collection, " Christ in Song.'' The 
morning song, '' Sterne rerum Conditor," and the evening 
song, " Deus Creator Omnium," are also famous. Trans- 
lations of most of them are to be found in " Hymns, An- 
cient and Modern," and some of them are used in the 
service-books of our unritual churches. 

The name of Ambrose is still borne by the liturgy of 
the Church of Milan, though a large part of it must be 
more ancient than his day. Parts of it he may have com- 
posed, and it was revised under his hand. But from the 
time, at least, of Gregory the Great, down to the present 
day, the ritual of the Church of Milan has been peculiar, 
differing in many respects from the Roman.^ Attempts 
have been often made to introduce the Roman liturgy in 
its place, but they have been always successfully resisted. 
The Latin Church everywhere else has relinquished the 
original mode of baptism, and, as Dean Stanley says, 
" with the two exceptions of the Cathedral of Milan and 
the sect of the Baptists, a few drops of water are now 
the Western substitute for the threefold plunge into the 
rushing rivers, or the wide baptisteries of the East." ^ 

1 Opera, ii. 873, Ep. xx. 34. 

2 Palmer, Origines Liturgicce i. 125-133; Muratori, Antichita Ital- 
iane, viii. 205-228. 

^ Eastern Church, 117. Robinson gives a description of minor- 



160 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

Ambrose was one of the men who, by Providential po- 
sition as well as by powerful character, had an important 
part in moulding the Latin Church and Latin Christian- 
ity, which have so greatly shaped the fortunes and colored 
the history of the modern world. At a juncture when 
the new religion was fixing its form, and organizing itself 
for the conquest of Western Europe ; when, as we cannot 
but think, it was violating its first principles, and abdicat- 
ing its noblest opportunity for the sake of temporal as 
well as spiritual dominion, and cherishing the ambition of 
advancing both together ; when it was condensing itself 
into a gigantic ecclesiasticism : this Roman civilian, trained 
in all civic duties and virtues, used to command, with the 
clear head, the resolute will, the austere virtue which be- 
long to the typical Roman, came to the See where, next 
to that of the metropolis of the world, he could direct the 
course of Western Christianity. He took the theocratic 
view, which is the farthest possible from ours. He held it, 
no doubt, sincerely ; not out of personal ambition, not so 
much, perhaps, from mere narrow sacerdotalism as from 
a profound conviction that religion, and the Church which 
he identified with it, was real king of the world. But in it 
was the germ of that dark growth of ecclesiastical power 
which has shed disastrous eclipse across the ages since. It 
without doubt has done service for mankind. It protected 
the weak against worse enemies. It carried the ark of 
God, the culture, the learning, the piety, the seeds of a bet- 
ter time, through ages of barbarism and darkness. It has 
often balanced and counterpoised, it has resisted and some- 
times avenged, the tyrannies of civil power. But another 
age has come, and the world henceforth refuses to shelter 
itself under the protection or to bear the yoke of ecclesi- 
astical power. That power wanes, and religion finds for 
itself a surer and a purer home in the heart of man, and 

baptism at Milan, according to the Ambrosian ritual in the twelfth 
century. History of Baptism, 95-102. 



SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME. 151 

in his voluntary submission to Divine law. History has 
shown that it is not safe to trust man with great power in 
the Church, and it is not needful. Religion is suppressed, 
asphyxiated, killed, under excess of organization. It lives, 
it grows, at all events it preserves its spiritual freshness 
and purity, in the air of liberty, and through the pro- 
cesses of spontaneous development. The aspiration and 
the destiny of Italy — of the Italy of Ambrose and Ca- 
vour, of Theodosius and Victor Emanuel — is for a free 
Church in a free state ; for religion at last to come to that 
happy position where the fathers of Rhode Island left it 
at the beginning of their history, — the Church, religion, 
to stand or fall by its own truth, virtue, spiritual power, 
and inward life, keeping itself out of civil government, 
keeping the government out of it. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES.^ 

Half-way between Rome and Naples there rises above 
the town of San Germano a mountain crag overlooking 
the valley of the Liris, — 

" The river taciturn of classic song," ^ 

crowTied with the white walls and gleaming windows of a 
building which, at first sight, the traveler might mistake 
for a palace or a castle. It is Monte Casino, the cradle 
of Western monasticisra, the capital of the Benedictines for 
over thirteen hundred years, — the most ancient and most 
illustrious monastery in Christendom. At its base are the 
ruins of a city going back to the dim times of the Volsci, 
with an amphitheatre of the days of the Caesars, and the 
villa of Yarro, who in learning and piety was a Pagan 
Benedictine of the best type. From its top opens a pros- 
pect of Italian beauty, with the river creeping across the 
hazy plain, the valleys scarped in soft lines in the northern 
and eastern hills, with the snow covered Apennines shining 
in the remoter horizon. Not far are Arpino, where Ma- 
rius and Cicero were born, and Aquino, the birthplace of 
Juvenal and Thomas Aquinas. Here, remote from cities 
and traveled resorts, on its isolated hill, is the home of a 
society whose antiquity, whose history, whose members, 

1 Published in the Baptist Quarterly, vol. x. 

Les Monasteres Benedictins d^ Italic j Souvenirs d'un voyage litt^- 
raire au dela des Alpes ; par Alphonse Dantier. Ouvrage couronnd 
par I'Academie Frau^aise. Deuxieme Edition. Paris : Didier & 
Cie. 1867. 

2 " Non rura quse Liris quieta 

Mordet aqua, taciturnus amnis." Horace, Ode I. 31. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 153 

whose wealth, learning, and literary treasures, and whose 
numerous progeny, give it a singular eminence. Its 
church surpasses every other in Italy, even St. Peter's 
itself, in elegant and costly decoration. Its library was 
the ark in which some of the richest treasures of ancient 
literature survived the dark ages. Its archives, with eight 
hundred original documents, furnish abundant material 
for ecclesiastical diplomatics and archaeology. And it was 
here, nearly five hundred years after Christianity had 
come into Italy, and two centuries after it had been legal- 
ized by Constantine, more than a hundred years after Ho- 
norius had decreed the extinction of Paganism and the 
destruction of its temples, and after Theodoric the Goth 
had interdicted its exercise in Italy under penalty of death, 
— it was here, on this little mountain in Campania, that 
the ancient religion found its last refuge, as if the better to 
survey the vast domain which the new faith had taken 
from it, and to breathe its expiring sigh over the loss. 
While ever3'where else in Italy the old idolatry had disap- 
peared, here, on this lofty height, so near the metropolis 
of Christendom, early in the sixth century, there was an 
ancient Temple of Apollo still undestroyed, and a grove 
where the peasantry still made sacrifices to gods and 
demons. 

It was to this spot, it was perhaps in order to attack 
and vanquish this abomination, that Benedict fled from 
the retreat he had tried to find in the gorges of Subiaco. 
There, among the wild and picturesque Sabine Hills, as- 
cending the course of the Ani as it hollows its path from 
fall to fall among the rocks, he had thirty-five years before 
taken refuge as he made his escape from the world whose 
attractions he dreaded. The son of a noble house of the 
town of Nursia, born in the year 480, and spending his 
boyhood in study at Rome, he had taken early disgust at 
the profligate manners of his companions, and before he 
was fifteen, if we may credit his biographer, Gregory the 



154 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

Great, he had resolved to renounce all prizes of the world, 
and try the discipline of solitude and penance. For three 
years he buried himself in a cave among the cliffs of Su- 
biaco, indebted for his hair-cloth shirt and dress of skins, 
and scanty fare, to a monk from a convent near by, who 
alone knew his place of concealment; and there he led 
the outward life of a wild beast, and, as he conceived, the 
inward life of an angel. He suffered inward torments 
and outward vexations. The legend goes that he con- 
quered his unchaste thoughts by rolling his naked body 
in a bush of thorns till the blood came. The monks of 
Vicovaro importuned him to take the rule of their house, 
and then, weary of his austerity, tried to poison him in 
the wine of the Eucharist. He returned to his cavern, 
where he could find better company in himself. Hahitavit 
secum^ says Gregory. But the fame of his sanctity had 
drawn a multitude of monks around Subiaco, who are soon 
gathered into a community, and Benedict is their superior. 
It had also exposed him to trials, and brought him ene- 
mies, the usual penalty of any kind of excellence. His 
good name and even his life is assailed; lewd women are 
introduced into his monasteries ; his efforts to maintain 
strict discipline are thwarted, and he resolves to abandon 
the spot sacred to him by so many years of conflict. He 
is nearly fifty years old ; but he perhaps cherishes in his 
soul the hope of better success in a new experiment. He 
carries in his bosom, it may be, the germs of the reform 
he is to start, of that institute he is to establish, and moves 
in the consciousness of a great purpose and a great des- 
tiny towards a new retreat among the hills of Campania. 
It is not unlikely that report had come to him of the lin- 
gering Paganism of the place, and that he went as a 
missionary to drive idolatry from a haunt where the neg- 
ligence of the Church and the ignorance of the people 
had allowed it to remain so long.^ M. Dantier adds the 
1 Beugnot, Destruction du Pagajiisme, ii. 287. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 155 

somewhat practical reason, that the land belonged to Ter- 
tullus, the rich father of Placidus, one of his young com- 
panions, and that the donation of it gave Benedict undis- 
puted possession of a spot for his little colony and his new 
experiment.^ Dante, in one of the fine passages of the 
Paradiso, hears Benedict tell the story of his success : — 

" That mountain, on whose slope Casmo stands, 
Was frequented of old, upon its summit, 
By a deluded folk, and ill-disposed ; 

And I am he who first up thither bore 

The name of him who brought upon the earth 
The truth that so much sublimateth us. 

And such abundant grace upon me shone. 

That all the neighboring towns I'drew away 

From the impious worship that seduced the world." ^ 

Benedict came into the world in the dark and troubled 
time when the Barbarians were invading Italy. His life 
nearly synchronizes with the period of the Gothic rule. 
The Roman Empire, after five hundred years of glory and 
shame, expired just before Benedict was born, when Odo- 
acer stripped Augustulus of the purple, and sent him into 
exile. The Roman literature came to a brighter close in 
Boethius, who, imprisoned in the tower of Pavia, was writ- 
ing his immortal " Consolation of Philosophy," five years 
before Benedict forsook the heights of Subiaco. While 
he was laying the foundations of the order which has done 
so much for the scholarship of Christendom, Justinian was 
silencing the voice of philosophy in the schools of Athens ; 
and, it may be added, the Code of Justinian, more potent 
and enduring even than the Rule of Benedict, was published 
in the very year, 529, in which Monte Casino was founded. 
It was amidst the invasions of this barbaric life, which was 
pouring its fresh blood into the veins of a decaying world, 
it was amidst the terrors and despairs of that age of disso- 

1 Dantier, i, 154. 

'2 Paradiso, canto xxii., Longfellow, 563. 



156 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

lution, that monasticism came into the West, and was 
organized for its great service. The Count de Montalem- 
bert couples the two together : — 

In order [he says] that the Church should save society, a new 
element was necessary in the world, and a new force in the 
Church. Two invasions were required, — that of the Barbarians 
from the North, and that of the monks from the South. The 
Roman Empire, without the Barbarians, was an abyss of servi- 
tude and corruption. The Barbarians, without the monks, were 
chaos. The Barbarians and the monks united, recreated a 
world which was to be called Christendom.^ 

There were monks and monasteries in the West long 
before Benedict. They were in the East before they were 
in the West. Monasticism is a child of the Orient. It 
does not belong to Christianity alone. It is in human 
nature. It is Pagan as well as Christian. Eight hundred 
years before St. Antony, Buddha turned ascetic and her- 
mit, and established a monasticism more ancient and more 
enduring than the Christian. The Indian Yogi and the 
Mussulman Fakir are spiritual relations of the Coptic 
hermit and Simeon Stylites. It is born of weariness and 
disgust of the world ; of remorse or of misfortune ; of the 
conflict with moral evil which it is vainly thought can be 
easier waged in solitude ; of the inclination for a life of 
seclusion, of contemplation, of freedom from social bonds 
or temptations ; of the asceticism so natural to the human 
heart, which thinks to find virtue and perfection, and to 
earn heaven at last, by personal austerities, by chastising 
the bod}^, and isolating the soul. It began in the simple 
asceticism which at first, without separating from society, 
condemned itself to silence, to fasting, to celibacy. Soon 
the ascetae retired into the woods and the deserts, becom- 
ing anchorites in lonely cells and hermitages. In time, 
from whatever cause, perhaps from very weariness of sol- 
itude, they drew together, building their huts in neighbor- 
1 Monks of the West, vol. i. 276, 283. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 157 

hood, with some sort of community ; and at last coming 
under one roof, forming closer association, and becoming 
cenobites, as the name indicates, having a common life, 
and finally a common rule and an established order. This 
ascetic tendency, beginning in solitude and ending in a 
separated society, of course was fostered by circumstances ; 
as in Egypt by the climate and geography, by the indo- 
lence, the gloomy fancies they engender, and the facilities 
for life out of doors ; by the persecutions on the one hand 
and the corruptions on the other of the Roman Empire ; 
the noblest spirits sometimes in their despairs flying out 
of a world falling to pieces into refuges of peace and 
prayer, and, when the privilege of martyrdom was passed, 
seeking its crown in the desert and the cave, in self-torture 
and spiritual suicide. It was not Christianity any more 
than the condition of society itself which drove men out 
of it. There was no energy, and no field for it. With 
the fall of the Empire, and the devastations of the Bar- 
barians, with oppressive taxes and idleness and public 
wretchedness, and the disturbance of life, men had nothing 
to do but turn monks. In the storm and general ship- 
wreck, they were glad of a harbor where they could aban- 
don all hope of this world for the sake of a future ; where 
at least the idle could live ; where even common spirits 
could win the honor of sanctity ; and where poverty would 
be without want, and wear even a badge of sacredness and 
honor. They emigrated from a world vexed by noises and 
strifes, and which offered them nothing, into some land of 
seclusion and silence, where they could be quiet and alone, 
and let the world go as and where it would. Times came 
when the monk turned into an ambitious priest, or a zeal- 
ous missionary, when the monastery mixed itself with the 
movements of the world outside. But originally the monk 
was a layman, willing to forego the excitements and gains 
of life for the sake of escaping its distractions or corrup- 
tions ; desiring to dismiss all hopes or fears of anything 



158 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

here below, that in quiet he might wait for what is to 
come hereafter. Monachism was a reaction from secular 
life, which, always burdensome to some spirits, was in the 
fourth and fifth centuries so full of desolations and mis- 
eries that there seemed no remedy but in flight from a 
world ruined beyond salvation. 

It was then tliat Christian monachism came into the 
West out of Egypt, its native country. There as early as 
the Decian persecution, in the middle of the third cen- 
tury, Paul of Thebes had begun the life of an eremite ; 
and there, under the inspiration of St. Antony's exam- 
ple, before a century had passed, the deserts from Nitria 
to the Thebaid were populous with anchorites and ceno- 
bites, as populous, it has been said, as the cities them- 
selves.i 

" Go," says the golden-mouthed doctor of Constantinople, " to 
the Thebaid ; you shall find there a soUtude still more beautiful 
than Paradise, a thousand choirs of angels under the human 
form, nations of martyrs, armies of virgins, the diabolical tyrant 
chained, and Christ triumphant and glorified." ^ 

Athanasius had known the solitaries of the Egyptian 
deserts, had been the friend, as he became also the biog- 
rapher, of Antony ; and it was Athanasius who was to be 
the missionary of monasticism to the West. Twenty years, 
five times during his episcopate, he was in exile. Twice he 
had taken refuge and found enthusiastic welcome in the 
Thebaid, and three times he had been a fugitive in the 
West. In 340 he came to Rome, bringing monks with 
him, and the report of a new form of religious life. His 
story took effect. Monasticism began to spread, and found 
apostles and defenders. Not only Basil and Gregory and 
Chrysostom in the East, but Ambrose at Milan, and 

1 Gibbon quotes Rufinus (c. 7, Vita Patrum, p. 461). " Quanti pop- 
uli habentur in urbibus tanta psena (paene) habentur in desertis mul- 
titudiues monachorum." — Dec. and Fall, c. xxxvii. 

2 Chrysostom, On Matt., Horn. viii. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 159 

Augustine in North Africa, and Martin of Tours, himself 
a monk before he became bishop, and Jerome, spending 
his last years in a monastery at Bethlehem, gave it sanc- 
tion and impulse. In Rome it touched some enthusiastic 
spirits. But it was opposed to the habits and the passions 
of Roman society, not yet emancipated from Paganism, 
and often provoked contempt and indignation. The pa- 
tricians preserved the easy manners of Paganism after 
they relinquished its doctrines, and the populace kept 
their prejudices, and to both the monks were detestable. 
Jerome relates that at the funeral of Blesilla, a nun whose 
days were thought to be shortened by excessive fasting, the 
people threatened to throw the monks into the river.^ " In 
the cities of Africa," says Salvian, " and more especially 
in Carthage, no sooner did a man in a cloak make his ap- 
pearance, pale, and with his head shaved, than the misera- 
ble infidel populace assailed him with curses and abuse." 
It took a different stamp from the more practical genius of 
the West.'*^ There were fools and follies enough, but not 
so many as infested the monasteries of Egypt and Syria. 
No saint of the pillar was known in the Latin Church. 
At the end of the fifth century these spiritual retreats had 
sprung up everywhere, in the glens of the Apennines, in 
the heights of the Jura, in the lonely islands of the Medi- 
terranean coast, in the remote wilds of Ireland and Wales. 
There were monks and monasteries, but no organization, 
no uniform discipline, — in a word, no monastic order. At 
first, and for two centuries, the monks were simply laymen, 
and the monasteries were lay associations, under no eccle- 
siastical engagements. They made their own laws. Their 
spirit was one of liberty and religious exaltation. Some 
of them wandered at will, religious vagrants and vaga- 
bonds. The West did not follow the extravagances of 

1 Gieseler, Ecc. Hist, i. 409. 

2 Guizot, Hist, of Civ., ii. 65; Mil man, Lat. Christianity, ii. 74; 
denied by J. H. Newman, Historical Sketches, iii. 377. 



160 UISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

monasticism in the East, neither did it altogether avoid 
them. The door of the cloister in the East or West was 
not shut against folly, pride, hypocrisy, even avarice and 
luxury. Such men as Augustine and Jerome, ardent ad- 
vocates and propagators of monachism, found occasion to 
denounce its excesses. 

With the world outside of the monastery full of con- 
fusion, amidst the dissolving of the Empire and the fear- 
ful agitations of society, should there not be confusion 
within ? The storms of the time cast into the monasteries 
all kinds of spirits, and especially such as were distracted, 
wretched, excited. They were asylums for the wounded 
rather than the well, for the eccentric rather than the 
sane. They were societies containing the prolific germs 
of good and evil, and with an undreamed future before 
them, but needing order and organization. If they were 
to be saved from degeneracy and ruin, if they were to 
withstand the storm and preserve civilization, they must 
gain a compact and firm order. They were not a clergy, 
subject to episcopal authority. Their law, their discipline, 
their organization, must come out of themselves. TJie re- 
former, the organizer, the legislator of monasticism, must 
be a monk, and that monk was Benedict. 

He had fourteen years of life remaining, in which he 
laid the foundations on Monte Casino which have endured 
so long. He purified the spot of its Paganism, became 
an apostle and missionary of religion to the populations 
around, and spread cultivation over the barren hillsides ; 
built the Abbey which, three times destroyed and rebuilt, 
has held its place for thirteen hundred years ; and above 
all, founded that moral edifice, that code of monastic 
rules, under whose shelter the monks of Western Europe 
lived and died througli so many generations. His sister, 
Scholastica, born on the same day with himself, had fol- 
lowed him to find a retreat near his own, where they met 
once a year, and dying within forty days of each other, in 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 161 

the year 543, they were buried side by side in a tomb 
which is still shown under the high altar of the Church of 
Monte Casino. It belonged to the habit of the time, 
and above all of the monkish literature, to surround its 
saints and heroes with an atmosphere of marvel. There 
are legends enough about St. Benedict, which need not be 
repeated, which need not be believed, such as invested 
with wonder every man who awakened the enthusiasm of 
his age. We may not believe them, our critical philos- 
ophy may pronounce them incredible and impossible. 
But they were believed. Gregory the Great, writing his 
biography fifty years later, related them for facts. 
Where there is smoke there is fire. Such legends are 
the poetry of history. But they spring out of real virtue 
and sanctity and heavenly communion, out of the faith, 
the reverence, the admiration at any rate, which believe 
the saint to be honored of Heaven, and crown his head 
with the aureole which is just as beautiful and golden for 
being imaginary and unsubstantial. It is not in the leg- 
endary story of Benedict, even with the gilding of fable 
washed off, so much as in the rule he established, that his 
real spirit and inner life is disclosed. If his life had con- 
sisted only of the wonders told of him, his name would 
have perished long ago. 

Hitherto the monks had been guided by rules like that 
of St. Basil, imported from the East, by vague traditions, 
and by such records as were to be found in the lives of 
the Fathers of the Desert. A fixed form and a fixed rule 
were now to be given to the monastic life. The code 
which Benedict wrote for his own house became the ac- 
cepted law of the monks of the West for centuries. It is 
divided into seventy-three chapters. It turns the clois- 
ter into a voluntary prison, and a prison for life. For it 
established the permanence of the monastic order by the 
vow of stability which it required. This was the great 
innovation which changed and fixed the monastic life into 
11 



162 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

an institution. Before, whatever moral obligation held 
the monk to his monastery, there was no formal engage- 
ment. The society lacked the cohesion which it took 
from the solemn and perpetual vow now required. A 
novitiate, indeed, was allowed. The perpetuity of vows 
required it in any wise legislation. Where there is no 
retreat, there ought to be the chance of previous delibera- 
tion. The applicant was left outside for some days to test 
his perseverance. He was then put under instruction in 
regard to the difficulties and hardships of his new voca- 
tion. If after two months he persevered, the entire Kule 
was read to him, with the closing words : " This is the 
law under which you wish to enlist ; if you can keep it, 
enter ; if you cannot, depart freely." This was to be 
repeated three times before the close of the year. He is 
then informed that he is about to lose all power of dis- 
posing of himself, or of laying aside the Rule which he 
now accepts after sufficient deliberation and trial. Then, 
says the Eule : — 

Let him who is to be received promise in the oratory, before 
God and his saints, the perpetuity of his stay, the reformation 
of his manners, and obedience. Let a deed be made of his 
promise, in the name of the saints whose relics are deposited 
there, and in presence of the abbot. Let him write this deed 
with his own hand, or, if he cannot write, let another, at his re- 
quest, write it for him, and let the novice put a cross to it, and 
with his own hand deposit the deed upon the altar. ^ 

The monk was to leave everything behind, abjuring fam- 
ily, society, country, property ; renouncing his own will in 
the pledge of absolute obedience, extending, in the strong- 
language of the Rule, even to things which are impos- 
sible. With the abdication of will, of personality itself, 
there went, of course, the renunciation of all individual 
property. All things were to be in common. 

It is especially necessary [says the Rule] to extirpate from 
1 Reg. S. Bened., c. 58. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 163 

the monastery, and to the very root, the vice of any one possess- 
ing anything in particular. Let no person dare to give or re- 
ceive, without the order of the abbot, nor have anything of his 
own peculiar property, not a book, nor tablet, nor a pen, nor 
anything whatsoever ; for it is not permitted them even to have 
their own body and their own will under their own power.-^ 

In fact, individuality was completely abolished, the will 
abdicated, self sacrificed in favor of obedience, absolute 
and without reserve. In fact, it was spiritual slavery of 
the worst kind. " That," says M. Guizot, " is the fatal 
present that the monks made to Europe, and which so long 
altered or enervated its virtues." ^ While the government 
of the monastery was an absolute despotism, it was despot- 
ism tempered by the liberty of election, and even by the 
privilege of advice. The abbot was to be elected by the 
free choice of the monks, and he was elected for life. He 
was also to take counsel with them in all matters of im- 
portance, though his decision was to be final and supreme. 

The monastery was a prison, but an industrial prison. 
The great reform which Benedict introduced into the mo- 
nastic institute was the ordination of labor. " Laziness," 
says his Rule, " is the enemy of the soul, and consequently 
the brothers should, at certain times, occupy themselves in 
manual labor, at others in holy reading." It accordingly 
regulated minutely the employments of every hour of the 
day, according to the seasons. Seven hours were ap- 
pointed for manual labor, and two for reading. " If," 
says the Eule, '' the poverty of the place, or the harvest, 
or any necessity keep them constantly at work, let them 
not be vexed ; for they are truly monks if they live by the 
labors of their hands, as our brothers the apostles did. 
But let all be done with moderation, for the sake of the 
weak." The regulations for reading illustrate the spirit 
of the Rule : — 

During Lent, all shall receive books from the library, which 
Fcec/. S. Bened., c. 33. ^ Hist, of Civ., ii. 77. 



164 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

they shall read, one after another, all through. Especially let 
one or two ancients be chosen to go through the monastery at 
the hours when the brothers are occupied in reading, and let them 
see if they find any negligent brother who abandons himself to 
sleep, or to talking, who in no way applies himself to reading, 
but is useless to himself and distracts others. If one of this 
kind is found, let him be reprimanded once or twice ; if he do 
not amend, let him receive correction, in order to intimidate the 
others. On Sunday, let all be occupied in reading except those 
who are selected for various functions. If any one be negligent 
or lazy, so that he will neither meditate nor read, let some labor 
be required of him, so that he may not be left to do nothing. 
Let some employment be imposed for the weak and delicate 
brothers, so that they may be neither lazy nor oppressed with 
severe work. 

Such distribution of time, giving so much to labor and 
so little to study, Benedict probably felt to be required by 
the circumstances of the monasteries of that age. They 
were agricultural colonies in their way, settling in uncul- 
tivated places, reclaiming the land, tilling the soil, — the 
agricultural missionaries and teachers of Europe. In 
time, when by industry and by donations these communi- 
ties had mastered nature and become rich, these prescrip- 
tions were modified, the hours of manual labor were re- 
duced, as they were also changed to the transcription of 
books and other literary tasks.^ 

Having regard to their hard labor in the fields and at 
their trades, perhaps also to rougher men and harsher cli- 
mate, he spared his monks some of the mortifications prac- 
ticed in the East. They were allowed a pint or more of 
wine a da}^, and the abbot was at liberty to deviate from 
the rules in regard to food and drink, according to the 
season of the year and the amount of labor, as he was re- 
quired to have respect to the necessities of the sick and 
infirm, of old men and of children. He also repressed the 
love of gain by requiring that the monks should sell the 
1 Dantier, i. 198. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 165 

products of tlieir industry at less price than secular labor- 
ers. The monastery must be so constructed that the mill, 
the bakery, the garden, and the whole internal economy 
could be carried on within the walls, so as to break up the 
vagabond ways into which so many monks had fallen, and 
to complete their seclusion from the world. 

M. Guizot speaks of the character of good sense and 
mildness which marks the Rule, and adds : " The moral 
thought and general discipline of it are severe ; but in the 
details of life, it is humane and moderate ; more humane, 
more moderate, than the Roman law, than the barbaric 
laws, than the general manners of the times." ^ Benedict 
himself intended it should be as moderate as the object of 
monastic life would allow. He says, in closing the pre- 
amble to his Rule : — 

We must then institute a school for the service of the Lord, 
in which we trust nothing harsh or burdensome will be estab- 
lished. If, however, anything a little severe, on reasonable 
grounds of equity, be enjoined for the correction of vice or the 
preservation of charity, do not in sudden alarm fly from the way 
of salvation. It is always narrow at the beginning, but walking 
some time in the way of obedience and faith, a man's heart 
dilates, and runs with unspeakable sweetness of love in the way 
of God's commandments. 

The Rule of Benedict has been praised by popes and 
princes ; by Gregory the Great, who believed it to be in- 
spired ; and by Charlemagne, who caused inquisition to 
be made if there were any other order in his empire ; by 
Louis le Debonnaire, who recommended it to his son as 
a manual of government ; and by Cosmo de Medici, who 
read it, as he said, for its good lessons in the administra- 
tion of his states and the government of his people ; ^ 
by Bossuet, who called it an epitome of Christianity ; and 
by Guizot, whose words have just been quoted ; by coun- 
cils which have recommended it ; and by the monasteries 
1 Hist, of Civ., ii. 80. 2 Dantier, i. 201. 



166 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

without number which have adopted it. Says Sir James 
Stephen : — 

The comprehensiveness of thought with which he so ex- 
hausted the science of monastic polity that all subsequent rules 
have been nothing more than modifications of his own ; the pre- 
science with which he reconciled conventual franchises with ab- 
batial dominion ; the skill with which he at once concentrated 
and diffused power among the different members of his order, 
according as the objects in view were general or local ; and the 
deep insight into the human heart, by which he rendered myr- 
iads of men and women, during more than thirty successive 
generations, the spontaneous instruments of his purposes, — 
these all unite to prove that profound genius, extensive know- 
ledge, and earnest meditation had raised him to the very first 
rank of uninspired legislators.-^ 

That Benedict expected for it such fame, and so wide a 
sway ; that he supposed he was making a Rule for an in- 
numerable progeny to spring out of the loins of bis single 
house, and for ages to come, there is little sign.^ It con- 
tains no reference to an association, or great order, such as 
sprung out of it. If it is elastic enough in scope for its 
subsequent growth, its future could hardly have been anti- 
cipated. Like all founders of great institutions, doing 
the duty of his time in the simplicity of faith, and estab- 
lishing a strict and wise order for his own house, be 
builded better than be knew, and laid the foundations of 
many generations. He simply sowed a seed in the ground, 
and it brought forth fruit, not according to the foresight 
of man, but according to the will of God. 

And yet his Rule contained in itself the reason of its 
success. It was written after long experience with the 

1 Essays, 236. 

2 In a single passage it prescribes a difference in the style of the 
monastic dress, according to country or climate, and the prescriptions 
for food and medicine refer to the expectation of having monasteries 
elsewhere. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 167 

class for which it was made, and was the fruit of earnest 
thought applied to the problem of organizing monastic 
life into permanent and useful form. The practical, 
organizing genius of the West found its expression and 
instrument in Benedict, who found a growing world of 
monasticism waiting for its law, and had the wisdom to 
enact and to try it. He committed it to missionaries, who 
went forth to plant it in new fields, in Sicily and in Gaul, 
on the heights of Soracte and the isles of the Adriatic. 
More than all, it may be, within a half century, in 590, a 
Benedictine monk, as the first of his order, came to the 
See of Rome, in the person of Gregory the Great. He 
did not forget his order. He never ceased to be a monk. 
He not only wrote the Life of Benedict, but gave the 
sanction of his supreme authority to his Rule. He guar- 
anteed the freedom of monasteries and the inviolability 
of their property. The Rule and the order of Benedict 
might have lived and triumphed had there been no Greg- 
ory, but they felt the influence and the help of his mighty 
hand. 

His own house was not to escape the calamities of a 
violent age. The Goths had spared it. A year before he 
died, by some strange freak of curiosity or superstition, 
Totila, the last and not the least of the Gothic sovereigns, 
reversing the victories of Belisarius, on his way through 
central Italy, sought out the saint of Monte Casino. The 
story goes that the barbaric king was awed by the pres- 
ence and softened by the words of Benedict, who even 
foretold his conquest of Rome, his reign of nine years, 
and his death in the tenth. The Goths disappeared, and 
the Lombards came in their turn. Their coming was in 
ravage and terror, and the home of the Benedictines did 
not escape. In 589 it was sacked, and the monks fled. 
They found refuge in Rome, where, under Pope Pelagius 
II., they built a monastery near the Lateran, remaining 
there one hundred and thirty years. After so long a time 



168 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

the sanctuary on Monte Casino was rebuilt, receiving 
great endowments, and by its wealth tempting the Sara- 
cens to destroy it in 884, the autograph copy of Benedict's 
Rule being at that time irrecoverably lost. In 1349 it 
was shattered by an earthquake, to be restored in 1365 
by Urban V. Towards the end of the seventeenth cen- 
tury it was rebuilt in its present form, with a magnificence 
before unsurpassed ; and on the 19th of May, 1727, was 
consecrated for the third time by a Pope, Benedict XIII. 
The community has passed through fortunes of equal 
interest with those of its residence. It has had illustri- 
ous inmates and illustrious guests. Its abbots have been 
princes of the realm. In its palmy day the abbot was 
first baron, and it held feudal privileges and rights.^ It 
was involved in the great strife between the Papacy and 
the Empire ; and when Hildebrand, who had, as Cardinal, 
assisted at the dedication of its basilica in 1071, retired 
from Pome to die at Salerno, he halted at the tomb of 
Benedict, and in his last hours nominated the Abbot Didier, 
afterwards Victor III., for his successor. It had opened 
its gates to Charlemagne, and Carloman, the son of Charles 
Martel, came here as a monk to find relief from the cares 
of empire. Its decline began in the political strifes of the 
Middle Age, in which it became more or less involved. 
The order of St. Benedict was too closely associated with 
the Poman pontificate not to share its waning fortunes. 
Monte Casino was at the summit of its power during the 
timxC of Gregory VIL, and it declined with the Papacy. 
Its decadence was marked in the second half of the fif- 
teenth century. The mendicant orders, with their mili- 
tant spirit, were coming into competition with the Ben- 
edictine, to contract its dominion ; and increase of wealth 

^ " A I'epoque de sa splendeur, elle comptait an nombre ses do- 
maines, 2 principautds, 20 comtds, 440 villes, bonrgs ou villages, 250 
chateaux, 335 manoirs, 25 ports de raer, et 1662 ^glises." — Dantier, 
i. 6, note. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 169 

tempted strong hands to lay hold of religious houses when 
they could. Commendatory abbots took the place of those 
elected by the chaj^ters, and in 1454 Monte Casino yielded 
to this abuse. In Canto xxii. of the Paradiso, Benedict 
says to Dante : — 

" And now my Kule 
Below remaineth for mere waste of paper. 

The walls that used of old to be an abbey 

Are changed to dens of robbers, and the cowls 
Are sacks filled full of miserable flour. 

But heavy usury is not taken up 

So much against God's pleasure as that fruit 
Which maketh so insane the heart of monks. 

For whatsoever hath the Church in keeping 
Is for the folk that ask it in God's name, 
Not for one's kindred or for something worse." ^ 

In commenting on the first line of this extract, Ben- 
venuto gives a description of Boccaccio's visit to the li- 
brary of !Monte Casino, in the last part of the fourteenth 
century. He says : — 

To the clearer understanding of this passage, I will repeat 
what my venerable preceptor, Boccaccio of Certaldo, pleasantly 
narrated to me. He said that when he was in Apulia, being at- 
tracted by the fame of the place, he went to the noble monastery 
of Monte Casino, of which we are speaking ; and being eager 
to see the library, ^vhich he had heard was very noble, he hum- 
bly — gentle creature that he was — besought a monk to do him 
the favor to open it. Pointing to a lofty staircase, he answered, 
stiffly, • Go up ; it 's open.' Joyfully ascending, he found the 
place of so great a treasure wuthout door or fastening ; and hav- 
ing entered, he saw the grass growling upon the windows, and 
all the books and shelves covered with dust. And wondering, 
he began to open and turn over now this book and now that, 
and found there many and various volumes of ancient and rare 
works. From some of them whole sheets had been torn out, 
in others the margins of the leaves were clipped, and others 
were greatly defaced. At length, full of pity that the labors and 

1 Paradiso, xxii., 74-84, Longfellow, 564. 



170 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

studies of so many illustrious minds should have fallen into the 
hands of such profligate men, grieving and weeping he with- 
drew. And coming to the cloister, he asked a monk whom he 
met why those most precious books were so vilely mutilated. 
He replied that some of the monks, wishing to gain a few ducats, 
cut out a handful of leaves, and made psalters, which they sold 
to the boys ; and likewise of the margins they made breviaries, 
which they sold to women. Now, therefore, O scholar, rack thy 
brains in the making of books. -"^ 

However Decameronian this story may appear — and 
M. Dantier is inclined to accuse both Dante and Boccac- 
cio of prejudice — there is probably truth in it.^ Still, 

^ Quoted by Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries, i. 271, from Valery, 
Voyages historiques, etc. 

2 In the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1875, Mr. Longfellow 
prints an exquisite pictorial poem, describing his visit to Monte 
Casino. He found the librarian incredulous about this story. 

" Boccaccio was a novelist, a child 

Of fancy and of fiction at the best ; 
This the urbane librarian said, and smiled 
Incredulous, as at some idle jest." 

It may be added that, under the supervision of Father Tosti, this 
little community, now reduced to about twenty persons, is engaged 
upon a catalogue of the manuscripts in their library. It is to be 
completed in five volumes, the first of which is already issued, and 
has been received by the Public Library in JBoston. It gives chromo- 
lithographic specimens of the writing, the initials, colored rubrics 
and ornamentation of the various manuscripts, with detailed descrip- 
tions and copious extracts. Eight hundred pages are devoted to 
forty-four manuscripts, which shows how thoroughly the work is 
done. In the Preface, Father Tosti gives a short account of the 
growth of the library, and closes with some mention of some of the 
more distinguished visitors in his time. Among them is Mr. Long- 
fellow, to whose name is attached this note : " Hcec carmina in tabu- 
laria, sua manu exarata, reliquit : — 

" ' Lives of great men all remind us 
We can make our lives sublime ; 
And, departing-, leave behind us 
Footprints on the sands of time.' " 

He could have hardly selected, in all literature, a verse more ap- 
propriate for such a visit than this one of his own. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 171 

through the disasters of the Abbey, the library kept its 
root and grew. Benedict was no literary person, and the 
patronage of learning was no object of his Rule ; but he 
provided for reading in his monastery, and required, 
whether for penance or pleasure, that during Lent all the 
monks should receive books from the library, which they 
were to read, one after another, all through.^ 

He thus gave an impulse to study. Another impulse 
probably came from the monastery at Vivarium, in lower 
Italy. There, five years before the death of Benedict, 
Cassiodorus, the great light of the Gothic monarchy, the 
minister and friend of its kings for thirty years, had re- 
tired from the court of Ravenna, weary of his tasks or 
his honors, and when nearly seventy years old, with an 
immense fortune, had founded, on his patrimonial estate, 
a monastery with magnificent buildings, amidst the incom- 
parable charms of the Calabrian shore. He did not 
renounce culture in the pursuit of spiritual perfection. 
He collected a great library, imposed study more than 
manual labor upon his monks, and turned his monastery 
into an academy. This example was not lost on the 
Benedictines at Monte Casino, when, in time, there was 
less occasion for manual labor, with perhaps more inclina- 
tion for study, and the spirit, if not the letter, of the Rule 
was kept, as the monks, many of them, turned from the 
fields and shops to the Scriptorium, where their labor was 
spent in the transcription of manuscripts, first Scriptural 
and patristic, and then literary and classical. In the 
eleventh century Monte Casino had become famous for 
this work, and much of it was widely disseminated. Its 
monks were among the best illuminators of the time. 
After the vicissitudes of so many centuries, and with the 
pilferings which Mabillon and his companions did not 
hesitate to charge upon the Vatican, there are still eight 
hundred manuscripts, mostly of the eleventh and twelfth 
1 Reg. S. Bened., XLVIII., Dantier, i. 354. 



172 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

centuries.^ There is a manuscript of Origen on the 
Epistle to the Romans, with an inscription indicating that 
it was in use in the middle of the sixth century .^ 

It is a mistake to suppose that the monastery is a uni- 
versity, a centre of active intellectual life. Occasionally 
there has heen a monk of intellectual force, like Thomas 
Aquinas or Anselm. But Dr. Newman claims, and with 
good reason, I think, that literary pursuits are a fall and 
departure from the pure, primitive idea of a monk. He 
is to mortify his reason as well as his flesh. He retires 
to a convent, not to search after truth, not to wrestle with 
the secrets of God, but to find repose. If he studies, it is 
in paths that do not distract, and which are well trodden. 
It is as much to keep out of idleness as to discover truth. 
Says Dr. Newman : — 

The object of the monks was rest and peace ; their state was 
retirement ; their occupation was some work that was simple 
as opposed to intellectual, namely, prayer, fasting, meditation, 
study, transcription, manual labor, and other unexciting, sooth- 
ing employments. Such was their institution all over the 
world. ^ 

Such is the history of the Benedictines at Monte Ca- 
sino, and everywhere. Here is a society thirteen hundred 
years old, with seclusion and silence, and a library, and 
what has it produced ? It has transcribed books, it has 
preserved manuscripts, and occasionally some work of his- 
tori(*al investigation has been done. It has added lit- 
tle to the intellectual treasures of the race. And yet it 
has done service for others in its time. It has preserved 
what it did not create. The monks could copy what they 
could not produce. They were the printers of the Middle 

^ For an account of the Library, see Dantier, i. 21-42. 

^ Donatus gratia Dei presbyter proprium codicem Justine Au gusto 
tertio post consulatum ejus, in aedibus B. Petri in Castello Lucullano 
infirmus legi, legi, legi. 

2 Historical Sketches. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 173 

Age, reproducing with the pen, illuminating with the pen- 
cil, the Scriptures, the writings of the Fathers, and the 
Greek and Latin classics, and thus performing an invalu- 
able service at a time when nobody else could or would do 
it. When a copy of the Bible was worth a king's ran- 
som, when the literature of the ancient world was in dan- 
ger of being lost, it was the Benedictines in the Scripto- 
rium of their abbeys who kept the lamp burning which 
without them had gone out. And then the abbeys and 
churches themselves, their very ruins, tell what the Ben- 
edictines did for the architecture of Europe. Almost 
every cathedral in England is a Benedictine foundation. 
At Rome, San Paolo-fuor-le-mure, with its magnificent 
basilica, belongs to this order. And it was for the Bene- 
dictine convent of San Sisto at Piacenza that Raphael 
painted the Madonna at Dresden, " which enchants the 
world." 

It is reserved for the cradle of the Benedictine order 
at Monte Casino to be its grave. The first, it is also the 
last in the splendid line, and has the singular fortune to 
outlive its innumerable children. While Benedict was 
yet alive his Rule began its victorious career. The year 
he died, his faithful associate, Maurus, had crossed the 
Alps, and planted the first monastery of his order at 
Glanfeuil, in the centre of France. Before the end of 
the century Augustine had j^lanted the Benedictine stand- 
ard at Canterbury, and the marks of the order are seen 
in the two universities, in twelve cathedrals, and in 
abbeys, beautiful for situation, and enchanting even in 
their ruin. The monasteries of an earlier or of an inde- 
pendent foundation accepted the Rule of Benedict. It 
supplanted and absorbed the Rule of St. Coluniban, the 
Irish missionary to France. For six centuries Latin 
monachism, while it was undivided, belonged to Benedict. 
And when decay and corruption came, as they did come 
with opulence and repose, and reform followed, as it did 



174 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

follow, when nobler spirits like Romuald and Bernard 
arose, the variations took new names, but were still his. 
The houses of Clugny, Camaldoli, and Yallombrosa, the 
Carthusians and Cistercians, with their separate founders, 
still venerated Benedict as the patriarch of them all. 

The panegyrists of this illustrious order [says Dr. Newman] 
are accustomed to claim for it in all its branches as many as 
thirty-seven thousand houses, and besides thirty Popes, two 
hundred Cardinals, four Emperors, forty-six Kings, fifty-one 
Queens, one thousand four hundred and six Princes, one thou- 
sand six hundred Archbishops, six hundred Bishops, two thou- 
sand four hundred Nobles, and fifteen thousand Abbots and 
learned men.^ 

In comparatively recent times the Benedictine name 
has flashed forth with new splendor. In the seventeenth 
century it revived more than its pristine literary glory in 
the Congregation of St. Maur. At this house, in Paris, 
gathered a company of scholars whose labors make an 
era in letters. Their editions of the great writers of the 
Church are a monument of industrious and careful schol- 
arship such as the world has never seen. Their researches 
in archseology and history, their indexes, prefaces, me- 
moirs, and dissertations, have the homage of all grateful 
ecclesiastical scholars. At a period of the richest literary 
fruitfulness the quickening influence invaded this quiet 
retreat, and it took its part in the harvest which enriched 
France in the reigns of the Great Louis and his prede- 
cessor. One hundred and five writers belonged to this 
illustrious Congregation, and contributed to its treasures. 
Not the least of their works is the annals of their ancient 
order, which is no mere piece of hagiology, but a grand 
accumulation of historical materials gathered from all 
the Benedictine ages. They unearthed the legends of the 
Middle Age, and, meaning to serve their Church, really 
exposed its follies to the unbelieving generation which fol- 
1 Historical Sketches^ iii. 272. Cf. Dantier, i. C (note), supra. 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 175 

lowed. Mabillon discussed the worship paid to unknown 
saints, and tried to discriminate the sanctity and to reduce 
the number of the large and rather mixed comj)any whose 
relics were hallowed by the Church. But he gave great 
offense at Rome. The learning of Montfaucon rivals the 
learning of Mabillon, and Kuinart and Achery and Mar- 
tene and the rest, shed a glory on the house of Maurists, 
at St. Germain des Pres, great in its way as that which 
illustrated in the same generation the house of the Cister- 
cians, the home of the pious Jansenists of Port Royal. 

It has come to this. Whether man is developed out 
of an Ascidian moUusk or not, the monasticism which be- 
gins with St. Antony, who could not read and despised 
a book, has traveled the long journey to Mabillon, the 
master of learning. The same system that produced 
Antony issued in Anselm and Abelard. It is difficult to 
put together in the same class the religious troglodytes in 
a cave in Upper Egypt, and the pale scholars who walk 
under the shades of Vallombrosa, or the stately cloisters 
of St. Denis or Westminster. But there are two monks. 
There are canonized fanatics and paupers and idiots, and 
there are missionaries like Boniface, and scholars like 
Alcuin, and saints like Bernard, and reformers like 
Savonarola and Luther. And there are two sides to 
monasticisQi, as w^ell as a principle at bottom by which it 
is to be finally judged. There are the unquestionable 
services, the great Providential uses, of this institution in 
ages of darkness and violence ; services to learning and 
religion, to agriculture and art, to the overthrow of Pa- 
ganism, to the diffusion of the Gospel, to the discipline of 
Christianity for its conquests among barbarians ; the in- 
dustrial, the missionary, the educational, the moral in- 
fluences which went out from the monasteries through ten 
centuries to mould the civilization, the thought, the reli- 
gion of Europe. Here is this great historical institution, 
with its degeneracies and its reforms, with good in it 



176 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

and evil in it, certainly filling a large place in the Church, 
in the entire life of the Middle Age. That that place was 
good and useful cannot be honestly denied. It is impos- 
sible, too, not to be touched with admiration for the 
nobler spirits who in cloisters have renounced everything 
else for the sake of the soul, that they might see the face 
of God ; for the superiority to mortal cares and fears and 
passions, and for the generous self-denial and heroism 
even which in so many instances illuminate the monastic 
annals. In a busy and out-of-doors age, let us appreciate 
the value of the monastic principle of separation from the 
world. The highest and best things of the world have 
been born in solitude, and there the noblest spirits have 
been nurtured. Not for the highest religion only, but for 
education, for study, for clearness of thought, for fertile 
production, there must be at least periodical seclusion. 

And yet the monastic institution is to be judged as a 
whole, not by the learning and sanctity of the few, not 
by its temporary uses in an evil time, not by the advan- 
tages of seclusion, not even by its ideal alone. It was op- 
posed in the beginning, for reasons of religion, of political 
economy, of patriotism. It has been finally suppressed by 
the consent of civilized nations for its mischiefs and cor- 
ruptions. Founded on a vow of poverty, it accumulated 
wealth, not always by right, to be used often for self-in- 
dulgence. Founded in a plan of industry, it degenerated 
often into indolence, and in some of its orders made men- 
dicity a virtue. It has withdrawn an immense force from 
the productive industry of the world, spent much of it 
in idle dreaming, in fruitless self-inspection, in impotent 
prayer, in injurious charity. It is fatal to domestic and 
to patriotic virtue, for the monk has no family and no 
country. 

The monk's theory of life, of God and goodness, is not 
a true, it is a false theory. The world is not such, life is 
not such, as he dreams. It is a slander on the Maker of 



BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 177 

the world that he did not make it to live in, to be good in 
it and not out of it. It is a false theory of the world, 
which is bad enough and miserable enough, a sick world 
and a dying world, and yet is God's world, and a good 
world, to be used and not despised after all. It is a 
slander on the holy name of Christ Jesus, who did not 
flee, but boldly bore up against the evil of the world and 
conquered it, that any of his followers must do otherwise, 
or that they follow him while they do otherwise. It is a 
slander on God that he is Lord of the soul and not of the 
body ; that he has set them at necessary war ; that the soul 
is God's, and the body the Devil's. It is a false theory of 
virtue that there is an aristocratic and a democratic kind 
of it ; that there are select spirits who are under a special 
rule, and who are to strike for a more perfect life, while 
they retire to pray for the rest of mankind who are inca- 
pable of it ; that there are two orders of men, when there 
is really only one, and that the monk in his cell, obeying 
God, if he does, is any better than his brother, just as 
virtuous, and using his time a great deal better and to the 
world's advantage in earning his dollar a day in making 
shoes. It is contrary to the theory of true religion, that 
the way to do the evil world good, to make it a better 
world, is to live in it. If the life withdrawn from the 
world into the monastery is good life, it is not wanted 
there, but it is surely wanted in the midst of sin and 
sorrow. 

A poor-house is useful, and the monastery is a poor- 
house in its original intention. But to exalt poverty to a 
virtue is at war with the interests of society, and brings 
no necessary purification or salvation to the soul. Charity 
is good, and the monastery dispensed charity. But the 
wealth used in charity was acquired, some of it at least, 
as the price of sin and under the constraint of terror, and 
it has been distributed for the perpetuity of pauperism. 
Prayer is good, and retreats for prayer may be useful. 

12 



178 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

But if prayer promotes indolence, if it degenerates into 
formality, if it takes the place of duty and righteous ser- 
vice, its benefit is doubtful, and a society organized only 
for that may be a mischief. Whatever Providential uses 
it has served, they have been temporary. Whatever call 
there may ever have been for it was local, and surely the 
time for it has passed away. What is good in the sixth 
or the tenth century, may be worse than useless in the 
nineteenth. 

The monk had notice of ejectment long ago. A new 
world has arrived, and the monk has no place in the busy, 
free, industrial civilization of to-day. Italy at last, the 
home of the Benedictine, dismisses him as useless, needed 
neither for learning, charity, nor religion. Fifteen hun- 
dred years ago Athanasius came to Rome to preach mo- 
nasticism, and now after fifteen hundred years, after so 
long a time, the Parliament of Italy comes to Rome to 
suppress its religious orders, and to sequestrate even the 
ancient house of the Benedictines to the uses of religion, 
charity, and education, but after the methods of a new, 
perhaps a more secular, less religious age. 

It is not an altogether sentimental regret which wishes 
that at least this ancient home of so much which is histor- 
ical, binding the Christian ages together, might be spared. 
Its buildings must remain, its archives and library ought 
not to be scattered, and there seems to be no political or 
other necessity for the dispersion of this small company 
of gentlemen and scholars who may be at least the guar- 
dians of the cradle and the tomb of their ancient order. 

Will the monk ever come back? Will a new Benedict 
be called to organize an institute to last through another 
thirteen hundred years ? It is too soon to say that the 
world, that Christianity, has outgrown asceticism and the 
monastic life which springs from it. Times of exhaustion, 
of convulsion, may come, very different from these, of 
labor and of liberty. Fanatic or ascetic impulses may 



i 

BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES. 179 i 

sweep through the Church. The spirits who in every age, | 

even. in our own time, find some charm in monastic life, j 

may multiply. The spirit which produces monks may I 

never die. But the tendency of modern society, the spirit 

of reformed, advanced Christianity, is opposed to any 

general development of monasticism, and it is only in a 

sporadic way that the religion, the civilization of the time, 

of the future, is likely to issue in an institution so anti- i 

quated and practically extinct. i 



THE MENDICANT ORDEES.i 

Not long ago, the " Quarterly " contained an article on 
St. Benedict and his Order. It is now proposed to 
trace the rise of two new orders, which appeared nearly 
seven centuries later, — those of St. Francis and St. 
Dominic. We may begin by connecting them with the 
previous history of monasticism, though they are hardly 
its lineal offspring, and by no means acknowledged the 
rule of Benedict or a place among his descendants. In 
the time since Benedict the monastic order had parted 
into many families, with other names, but in all its vari- 
ations still regarding him as its patriarch and chief. No 
institution could last through half a millennium without 
corruptions, such as belonged to its very constitution and 
to the times. Founded in poverty, it became by the very 
tendencies of society one of the wealthiest of corpora- 
tions. It is an observation of Sismondi that religion, 
from being in the beginning a matter of morals and after- 
wards of orthodoxy, after the seventh century was reduced 
to a question of liberality to monasteries. Into them reli- 
gion poured its gifts, and by the commutation of vows, by 
fears of the end of the world, by the price paid for reli- 
gious insurance furnished in one way or another by the 
Church, they were wonderfully enriched. The increase of 
wealth was naturally the relaxation of monastic rules, and 
even of moral obligations. Their recruits were not many 
of them saints, most of them of common mould, and even 

1 Published in the Baptist Quarterly, vol. ii. 

Monumenta Franciscana : Edited by J. S. Brewer, M. A., Profes- 
sor of English Literature, King's College, London, and Reader at the 
Rolls. Published by the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury. 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 181 

in their seclusion were open to temptations and vices be- 
longing- to their kind of life. A venal or licentious abbot 
would degrade the moral tone of the whole community. 
In the ninth century the convents were hereditary fiefs of 
secular princes, and suffered from their control. From 
many causes came loose discipline and evil manners, and 
with them occasion for reformation whenever nobler 
spirits, impatient of license and eager for sanctity, ap- 
peared. Often it was easier to form a new society than 
to purif}^ the old, and new rules were invented to prevent 
old abuses. In the eighth century Benedict of Aniana 
undertook the renovation of monastic discipline in France. 
At Clugny, and later at Fontevraud in France, at 
Hirschau in Germany, at Camaldoli and Yallombrosa 
among the Apennines, houses arose in the tenth and 
eleventh centuries, restoring or increasing the severity of 
the Benedictine discipline. The Carthusians, with their 
Certosa, at Pavia, the most splendid monastery in 
Europe ; the Cistercians, with St. Bernard to give them 
the lustre of his great name ; the Premonstratensians, the 
Carmelites, the Trinitarians, the Humiliates, with the 
knightly orders of the Hospital and the Temple, while 
multiplying the orders, illustrated the growing influence 
of monasticism in the age when the Papacy was also wax- 
ing to its supreme power. Monasticism, which was in the 
beginning a reaction from the secular spirit and a refuge 
from civil disorders, at this epoch found in the seculari- 
zation of the Church and of life, in the political storms 
evoked by the quarrels between the popes and the emper- 
ors, in the wild life of the knights and the degeneracy of 
the clergy, in the same spirit of ferment, of dissatisfac- 
tion, of compunction among the nations of Western 
Europe which promoted the Crusades and the rise of new 
religious sects, enough to stimulate its growth. Becoming 
secularized itself, it was constantly giving birth to new 
reactions against the encroaching corruption. So that at 



182 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

the very period where our story begins, in the beginning 
of the thirteenth century, at the Lateran Council in 1215, 
Innocent the Third prohibited the formation of any new 
order, and required that whoever wished to become a 
monk should attach himself to some one of the already 
existing rules. 

And yet it was becoming clear that, if monasticism kept 
in its old grooves, it would not meet the exigencies of the 
times. While the Pontiff had immensely strengthened 
his authority, while the Crusades were aggrandizing the 
Church, while monasticism was passing through these 
alternations of reform, and while a certain religious ardor 
was issuing in these results, it was also manifesting itself 
in a disaffection with the Church and its rule. A spiritual 
rebellion was breaking out in all parts of Christendom. 
It was not an intellectual insurrection, like that of Abe- 
lard, or politico-religious, like that of Arnold of Brescia ; 
it was a popular discontent with the hierarchy, a revolt 
against the creed, the practice, and the authorities of 
the Church. Whatever form it took, it was profoundly 
moral ; the irrepressible repugnance of common people to 
spiritual aristocracy and secular religion ; a longing for 
the restoration of apostolic order and faith. It was gen- 
erally unsacramental, anti-sacerdotal, an anticipation in 
some sort of the Anabaptists, the Puritans, the Separatists 
of a later time. It sprung in part from the same spirit 
which was asserting municipal independence in Florence 
and Genoa, in Frankfort and Bruges, in the guilds and 
free cities. It was the index of still more discontent, 
suppressed and secret. It was sufficient to disturb the 
clergy, and send solicitude to the Pope. He had humbled 
the pride of the Hohenstaufens, but here was an enemy 
more difficult to reach and to crush. It was the heretic 
at home, and not the infidel in Palestine, calling for a 
new crusade. Three times in a hundred years the bish- 
ops of the Latin Church were called to the Lateran in 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 183 

general council to consider tliese dangers. Against them 
monasticism could not make head, unless it took new 
form. It was too rich and stationary. It was fixed to 
one spot, and encumbered with too much property to move 
easily. It was a band of refugees from the world, rather 
than an army for its conquest. If the discontented fled 
there, their questions were silenced rather than answered. 
The religion which retired into monasteries was quiet on 
principle and by habit. If it quarreled with the clergy, 
it supported the Pope, who gave it exemptions and privi- 
leges. Its charity was rather for the purchase of merit 
and salvation for themselves, than love to the souls of 
men. It invited men to come, but did not go after them. 
And to those who did not come, the poor people who had 
no wealth and wanted spiritual satisfaction, the sight of 
magnificent abbeys and idle monks, and a religion which 
only ate and prayed, was only an inflammation to their 
discontent. The Albigenses made great argument of their 
own poverty contrasted with the self-indulgence of the 
monks. Monasticism as it was had no power sufficient 
to convince and convert them. Something more free, 
more practical, less separated from life, less wedded to 
sacred places, less entangled by superfluous property, was 
needed in order to maintain the power of the Church and 
the Pontiff. A more militant body, a flying artillery, a 
corps of spiritual Zouaves, must go among the people and 
after them, meeting the sects on their own grounds and 
with their own weapons. There must be a crusade for res- 
cue, as well as for suppression. The heresy which would 
not yield to the brand and the sword, might yield to the 
sermon and an unworldly devotion. What could not be 
done by monks might be done by friars. And so the 
friars came, and the new mendicant orders, for two cen- 
turies, play a most important part in the fortunes of the 
Church and the Papacy. In them the religious fervor of 
the Middle Age culminated. Through them it became 



184 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

preaching and missionary, and arrested the dangers and 
losses which menaced the hierarchy. St. Francis and St. 
Dominic, with Benedict and Loyola, are the unordained 
founders of institutes as potent as the clergy, and almost 
as the Pontificate itself. 

For the first sixteen years of the thirteenth century, the 
Papal chair was occupied by Innocent III. If he was not 
the greatest of Popes, the Pope was never greater. Never 
was bolder assertion of absolute power, and never, per- 
haps, a time more favorable for the assertion. Christen- 
dom not only assented to it, but seemed to require it,- — at 
any rate to tempt to it. The Guelphs and Ghibellines 
were at strife, and Italy in political confusion ; the Empire 
was in disorder, and claimed by rivals for the crown ; 
John in England, and Philip Augustus in France, both 
provoked the terrible interdict of the Pope; heresy de- 
manded his vigilance, and provoked wrath even to blood ; 
and everywhere was the opportunity for his interposition. 
He exercised it as a right, and he exercised it with vigor. 
His plans did not always carry, and some of them failed 
after his death. And the legend, that it was only with 
difficulty he escaped the torments of the damned, shows 
that the vicar of God is not above public opinion, how- 
ever safe he may be in regions beyond it. But his char- 
acter and bearing fitted his great place, to which he came 
when he was in middle life, and which he held with serene 
pride and unquestioned supremacy to the end. 

It was to Innocent the question was submitted whether 
or not the religious enthusiasm which created these new 
orders should be sanctioned and used, or be turned away, 
perhaps to break out in new spiritual disaffection, becoming 
a trouble rather than a help to the Church. More than a 
generation ago, Mr. Macaulay, the most brilliant reviewer 
of his time, and in one of his most brilliant papers, drew 
that picture of the different policies of the Roman and 
English Churches which everybody has read. He says : ^ — 
1 Macaulay 's Miscellanies, iii. 334. 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 185 

The Church of Rome thoroughly understands, what no other 
church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts. She 
neither submits to enthusiasm nor proscribes it, but uses it. 
She knows that when religious feelings have obtained the com- 
plete empire of the mind, they impart a strange energy, that 
they raise men above the dominion of pain and pleasure, that 
obloquy becomes glory, that death itself is contemplated only as 
the beginning of a higher and happier life. She knows that a 
person in this state is no object of contempt. He may be vul- 
gar, ignorant, visionary, extravagant ; but he will do and suffer 
things which it is for her interest somebody should do or suffer, 
yet from which calm and sober-minded men would shrink. She 
accordingly enlists him in her service, assigns to him some for- 
lorn hope, in which intrepidity and impetuosity are more counted 
than judgment and self-command, and sends him forth with her 
benedictions and her applause. 

The ignorant enthusiast, whom the Anglican Church makes 
an enemy, and, whatever the learned and polite may think, a 
most dangerous enemy, the Catholic Church makes a champion. 
She bids him nurse his beard, covers him with a gown and hood 
of coarse dark stuff, ties a rope around his waist, and sends him 
forth to teach in her name. He costs her nothing. He takes 
not a ducat away from the revenues of her beneficed clergy. He 
lives by the alms of those who respect his spiritual character, 
and are grateful for his instructions. He preaches not exactly 
in the style of Massillon, but in a way which moves the passions 
of uneducated hearers, and all his influence is used to strengthen 
the Church of which he is a minister. To that Church he becomes 
as strongly attached as any of the cardinals, whose scarlet car- 
riages and liveries crowd the entrance of the palace on the Quir- 
inal. In this way the Church of Rome unites in herself all the 
strength of establishment and all the strength of dissent. With 
the utmost pomp of a dominant hierarchy above, she has all the 
energy of the voluntary system below. 

Such an offer was now made to Innocent, which, as we 
shall see, he accepted, not without distrust, which per- 
haps the future justified, but with the traditional sagacity 
of his office, which hardly needed the addition of a super- 



186 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

natural vision or inspiration to explain it. As Bonaven- 
tura tells the story, on a summer evening, in the year 1210, 
as he was walking* the terrace of the Lateran, engaged 
in thought over the problems of his great Empire, he was 
interrupted by a stranger in a shepherd's dress, with bare 
and unwashed feet, who asked his attention. Angry at 
so abrupt an intrusion upon the privacy of the ruler of 
Christendom, he sternly ordered the man to withdraw. 
But that night he dreamed. According to one legend, 
he saw a palm-tree shoot up at his feet and come to full 
growth before his eyes. According to another, it was the 
great basilica of St. John Lateran falling to the ground 
and suddenly propped up by the poor stranger he had so 
summarily dismissed. Whether by dream, or by methods 
quite as common in the councils of the Lateran, the Holy 
Father had learned that he had sent away a man who had 
something to say to him which it might be of service to 
hear. It is not impossible that the stranger, who with all 
his simplicity was not altogether lacking in worldly wis- 
dom, had discovered that so mighty a potentate could be 
reached in ways more sure, if less direct, than that which 
he had tried. At all events he was recalled to the pres- 
ence of the august Pontiff, to make known his errand. 

It was Brother Francis, who, with some companions, 
had walked from Assisi, in the midsummer dust, to ask 
tlie sanction of the Po})e for their little company, and a 
rule by which they had bound themselves. He was then 
about twenty-eight years old. He was born in Assisi, the 
son of Pietro Bernardone, a prosperous trader in silk and 
wool, who, returning from France after the birth of his 
son, changed the name Giovanni, given him by his mother, 
to Francisco, for the sake of the country where, perhaps, 
he had just made a prosperous venture. Till he was 
twenty-five, he had followed his father's business ; a gay 
youth, given to dress, to music and mirth, free in spending 
and giving. He had served as a soldier in some fight with 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 187 

Perugia, where, being taken captive, he was in prison for 
a year. He still showed a soldier's bent, when, recovering 
from a serious illness in his twenty-fifth year, he started 
out to enlist in the contest of the Guelph against the 
German, from wdiich, in a recurrence of his fever, and 
prompted by one of its visions, he soon turned back. Of 
the nature of his disease there is little information. Its 
physiological effects might explain the eccentric vein in 
his character. But it brought a crisis in his life. 

He began to feel upon his soul an unseen power, bind- 
ing him more and more, and through waverings and strug- 
gles carrying him into a new world of renunciation and 
faith. Strange impulses moved him, and yearnings after 
a vocation wdnch was not yet clear. He heard voices of 
Christ in dreams. He went to Rome, and dashed all the 
money he had upon the altar of St. Peter's. He exchanged 
his fine dress for a beggar's. He went to a hospital of 
lepers, and tended these offensive outcasts with unneces- 
sary sympathy. He heard a call to repair the dilapidated 
Church of St. Damian ; and rushino- to Folit^no with a bale 
of goods, he sold pack-horse and pack, and brought the 
money to the curate, who refused, whether from honesty 
or from caution, to take it. Here for a, time he kept in 
concealment from his father, who was enraged over the 
loss of his goods and the conduct of his son. At last he 
appeared, but so squalid and haggard that the rabble 
hooted him in the streets, and the indignant father shut 
him up in his house. Through the indulgence of his 
kinder mother, he escaped. But the father brought him 
before the magistrate, and then the bishop. The good 
bishop advised him to return the money, and renounce 
all right to inheritance, as the father demanded. " I will 
restore the very clothes he gave me," said Francis, and 
stripped himself to his shirt. " I have called Pietro Ber- 
nardone my father, but henceforth I am a servant of God, 
and he only is my Father." And he went away, wearing 



188 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

the coarse frock of a laborer, which the bishop had ordered. 
He could not escape his fancy, if you will call it so, for 
repairing decayed churches, and still clung to a literal 
interpretation of the call he had heard in St. Damian. 
The money he failed to get from his father he extracted 
by inexorable begging from the citizens, and undertook 
the work himself, carrying stone, paying the workmen, in- 
spiring the whole enterprise, till the renovation was ac- 
complished. A little out of the town was the Church 
of St. Peter's, and he did the same work for that. The 
Chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, at the Portiuncula, 
which afterwards became the cradle and home of his in- 
fant order, he also repaired. For two years he was oc- 
cupied with such work ; a layman, never thinking even of 
being a monk, with no tonsure, no orders, no ecclesiastical 
position at all. The man was acting out the religion which 
was in him in a way of his own. He lived for others, and 
not for himself. A simple enthusiast, he despised all com- 
fort, w^as eager for spiritual perfection, seeking it in such 
ways of self-denial and Christian helpfulness as came. 
One day, in 1208, he was at mass in the little Church of 
Our Lady, when there came to him, like a new revelation, 
the words of our Lord : " Provide neither gold, nor silver, 
nor brass, in your purses ; neither scrip for your journey, 
neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves. And as 
ye go, preach." At once he cried, '' This is what I have 
been after," and throwing away his purse, his staff, his 
shoes, and binding a rope round his coarse tunic, started 
out of the church on his new-discovered mission. We can 
see him, as after six centuries the traveler sees his bare- 
footed successor, begging and preaching in Italy to-day. 
We may figure him a little more clearly as he is described 
by his contemporary biographer, Thomas Celano : — 

He was of middle stature, rather under than over, with an 
oval face, and full but low forehead ; his eyes dark and clear, 
his hair thick, his eyebrows straight ; a straight and delicate 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 189 

nose, a voice soft, yet keen and fiery ; close, equal, and white 
teeth ; lips modest, yet subtle ; a black beard, not thickly grown ; 
a thin neck, square shoulders, short arms, thin hands, with long 
fingers ; small feet, delicate skin, and little flesh ; roughly clothed, 
sleeping little, his hand ever open in charity. 

Handsome Italian fellow, gallant, and troubadour that 
he had been, it is a strange transformation. He has taken 
Poverty as his bride ; as Bossnet says : " The most ardent, 
the most enraptured, and, if I may say so, the most des- 
perate lover of poverty, perhaps, which the Church has 
ever had." The nuptials are commemorated in the fres- 
coes of Giotto, and the verse of Dante : — 

" Still young, he for his lady's love foreswore 
His father ; for a bride whom none approves, 
But rather, as on Death, would close the door. 
In sight of all the heavenly court that moves 
Around the Eternal Father, they were wed, — 
And more from day to day increased their love. 



" And lest my hidden words the truth should veil, 
Francis and Poverty these lovers were. 
Of whom I weave at too great length my tale ; 
Their concord, of dear love the minister ; 
Their joyful air, their loving looks and kind, 
Did holy thoughts in every spirit stir." ^ 

It was in no poet's dream he wedded poverty. It was 
the hard reality. He would literally have nothing, and 
live from hand to mouth, as God should give. That such 
a person should have followers might seem improbable. 
But his first disciple was one of the rich men of the town. 
The second was a canon of the cathedral. There was a 
reality in the man and his religion which began to tell 
upon observers. The three w^ent together to the Church, 
and, kneeling before the altar, the priest, at their request, 
opened the missal for them three times. The first text 
was : " If thou wilt be perfect, sell all that thou hast and 
^ Paradiso, xi. 58-78. 



190 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

give to the poor." The second : " Take nothing for your 
journey." The third : " He that would come after me, let 
him take up his cross and follow me." The appeal to 
Scripture satisfied them, and Francis was no longer alone. 
Others came, and there was a brotherhood and the begin- 
nings of an order. But there was no constitution, no rule, 
no bond, little beyond his personal influence. As com- 
panions came, as some idea of a vocation, of a possible 
work, of a better order of life, was rising in him, he felt 
the necessity of a rule, and perhaps discerned the begin- 
ning of an order which should long survive him. The 
story is told by Celano, that one morning, when he had 
stolen out before day for prayer, he was filled with great 
ecstasy ; and returning, he called the little brotherhood 
round him, and told them to rejoice in God, and not be 
sad because they were few. God had revealed to him in 
vision the increase of his little family. He had seen a 
multitude of men coming to him from all quarters. The 
French, the Spaniards, the Germans, the English, were 
thronging the roads, each in his own language encourag- 
ing the rest. He exhorted them to go and preach. 
Drawing on the ground a figure o^ the cross, with its 
limbs towards the four points of the compass, and ranging 
his brethren on these lines, he dismissed them to their 
work with the words, " Cast thy burden upon the Lord, 
and he shall sustain thee." 

Meanwhile he meditated the rule for his new order. 
The three monastic vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obe- 
dience, established six hundred years before by Benedict, 
were adopted. But in a Benedictine abbey there was in- 
dividual poverty, but corporate wealth. In a monastery, 
too, men shut themselves up, seeking their own salvation, 
and leaving the world outside to save itself as it could. 
With Francis, poverty and preaching were to be the great 
institutes. The poverty was to be absolute ; no money in 
their purses, not even a purse to hold money ; no provi- 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 191 

sion to be made, but to eat what was given day by day ; 
no vineyards, and flocks and herds, and conventual wealth, 
but beggary instead. The monasteries were retreats 
where learning was cherished and preserved ; where men 
chastened their passions, and multiplied their prayers, 
and every day went through a desperate struggle to save 
their souls. But Francis almost forgot he had a soul. 
He felt that other men had, and he must do what he 
could to save them. Not to flee into seclusion, but to go 
after men, and lay hold of them ; not to enjoy learned 
leisure in the cloister, but to preach the gospel to the 
poor, — this was the work for him and his brethren. And 
they were not fathers, but brothers, lesser brothers, Frati 
Minori, as the humblest of God's servants. There were 
now twelve of them ; and this was the errand of Francis 
at Home, to procure a sanction from the Pope for their 
association, which Benedict and other founders of religious 
orders had not sought. 

Innocent was too sagacious not to see that a spirit so 
fervid, so resolute, so austere, even in its very dirt and 
beggary, could be made a great force for the Church or 
against it. Some of the cardinals said it was a rule be- 
yond human power to keep. Others said it was the way 
of the gospel, and it would hardly do to deny these poor 
men on the ground of its difficulty, for that would be im- 
pugning the gospel itself. Even ordinary prescience 
might have seen in it a missionary power which would go 
far towards counteracting the influence of heretical sects, 
or absorbing the spirit out of which they were recruited. 
And so Innocent sent them away with an unwritten and 
provisional approval. He was willing the experiment 
should be tried, so he said, and, " if you succeed, when you 
come back I will do better by you." Rejoicing with his 
benediction, they went back to Assisi. The little Church 
of Portiuncula, which Francis had restored, belonged to 
the Benedictines of Subiaco, and they gave it with a little 



192 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

plot of ground to this new order, who were to shed upon 
it a lustre equal to that which Benedict left upon the con- 
vent among the Sabine Hills. They did not stay here. 
They went abroad, and wherever they went men listened 
and followed. In 1215 a chapter of the order gathered 
at the Portiuncula, and ordained provincial masters in 
Spain, Ravenna, France, and Germany ; and in 1219 a 
second chapter encamped on the plain about Assisi with 
five thousand brethren. 

Another order, an order of nuns, founded on the same 
austere rule of poverty, sprung up under the influence of 
his example. Clara, the daughter of one of the noble 
houses of Assisi, longing to follow in the same paths, 
sought the counsel of Francis, and by his advice left her 
home, took refuge in his little chapel, and, renouncing the 
world, began a life of mortification and prayer. Others 
joined her, and thus began the Order of Poor Clares, 
practicing the same rule of voluntary poverty with the 
Minorites. 

It is one evidence of the effect of the preaching of St. 
Francis and his brethren, that he found it necessary, in 
1221, to found a third order. There are legendary stories 
of the whole population of some of the Umbrian villages 
desiring to enter his order. It was easy to have too large 
a following. The excited people were too ready to leave 
their families, and assume the vows of poverty. He 
therefore devised an intermediate plan, by which they 
could still live in the world, and yet come under vows 
to God. He formed an Order of Penitents, which was 
really a better Church within the Church, leading a stricter 
life, bound by a stricter rule. Frequent fasts, no amuse- 
ments, no unnecessary oaths, no lawsuits, no bearing- 
arms except for the Church or for the country, the dis- 
charge of all debts, restitution for unrighteous gains, and 
a vow to keep all God's commandments, were the require- 
ments of the order. It was Puritanism. It was Method- 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 193 

ism. It was Franciscanism carried to the people, and 
adapted to tlieir condition. It was but a natural out- 
growth of that revival of religion which had followed their 
preaching. It was a wide, even shrewd expansion of 
their institute, and accommodation of its rules for gather- 
ing a larger number of people under some stricter reli- 
gious obligation, and thus perhaps furnishing new support- 
ers and soldiers for the Pontifical throne. 

It is said that Francis hesitated for a time between a 
life of solitary devotion and one of preaching. Not per- 
haps from any selfish regard, for that was not his spirit ; 
but rather from a humble account of himself, as so little 
furnished by any education for so great a work. He felt 
that he had a greater gift of prayer than of preaching ; 
that in prayer he discoursed with God ; but in preaching 
he had to let himself down to men, and think and speak 
like men. But love triumphed over fear, and his courage 
was vindicated by his success. That his preaching was 
fervid, impassioned, mystical, is quite sure from his char- 
acter. He once, while in Rome, to secure the confirma- 
tion of his rule in 1223, under the patronage of Cardinal 
Ugolino, undertook to recite a sermon which his anxious 
and politic patron had urged him to prepare, but fortu- 
nately broke down, and, giving himself up to such inspira- 
tions as came, made a good escape, and Honorius granted 
what Innocent had promised. With the establishment of 
his order, he had an ambition to confront the Infidel on 
his own field. He set off for Egypt, where the Crusaders 
were encamped before Damietta. He considered the 
situation, and resolved to cast himself on his faith, and 
march into the face of the enemy. It would be a short- 
hand way to win the Holy Sepulchre, and stop fighting, 
if he could only convert its keeper. He was taken by the 
Saracen scouts, and, though the price of a Christian's head 
was a golden bezant, w^as carried to the Sultan. He im- 
proved his opportunity, and preached to him the Trinity, 

13 



194 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

probably in a language as incomprehensible as the doc- 
trine. He proposed to put the two religions to the test, 
by going with any of the priests of Islam into the fire ; to 
which they naturally objected, as not being themselves on 
trial. He proposed to go into the fire alone, if only the 
Sultan would embrace the Gospel, which probably did not 
seem to him quite fair exchange, — the creed of the Mos- 
lem for the ashes of a friar. With the Oriental reverence 
for insanity, or with compassion for something weaker, 
or possibly even out of the respect human nature has for 
sincerity and courage in opinion, he sent him back un- 
harmed to the Christian camp. His enterprise was a 
failure. He started to win martyrdom for himself, and a 
convert to the Gospel. He had succeeded only in winning 
admiration for his simplicity, which was the last thing his 
simplicity thought of or wanted. He had been brought 
back safely to the Christian army, which was not the 
object of his solicitude, however much his spirit might 
have imj)roved its character, or altered its fortunes. At 
all events, he predicted the defeat which soon befell them, 
and so showed himself more successful in prophesying on 
the one side than in preaching on the other. 

Such a life could not last long ; and when he was forty- 
two years old, he began to feel in his worn frame the 
signs of an end not far off. The body which he treated 
with contempt began to show its resentment. And yet, 
according to the belief of his brethren, and of all the 
Franciscan generations since, it was before its dissolution 
stamped with miraculous marks of likeness to that divine 
form which hung on the cross for man's redemption. 
Among the Apennines on the borders of Tuscany, at no 
great distance from the more ancient monastic seats of 
Vallombrosa and Camaldoli, is La Vernia, the Francis- 
can sanctuary. This wild solitude of rocks and forests, 
the Monte del Alvernia, among the highest summits of 
the Apennines, was given to Francis and his companions 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 195 

hj one of the Tuscan nobles, for a retreat for penitence 
and prayer. It was good for little else, and there was 
little inconsistency in their accepting the gift. Into those 
deep solitudes and awful cells he retired, given up to 
ecstasies of devotion. Here, with three of his brethren, 
he kept the secondary Lent of St. Michael, in 1224. He 
consulted the Holy Oracles, and three times the Scrip- 
tures opened at the Passion of our Lord. This was inter- 
preted as a sign that he was to be made like the Saviour 
by his sufferings. On the seventeenth of September, his 
ecstasy reached its height, and, as the story is told, while 
in prayer there appeared to him, in vision or reality, a 
radiant seraph, enfolding in his six flaming wings the 
form of one crucified. " He marvelled," says Bonaven- 
tura, " greatly at the sight of a vision so past finding 
out ; knowing that the infirmity of the Passion could in no 
wise agree with the immortal nature of a seraphic being. 
At length from it he understood, by the revelation of the 
Lord, that he, not through martyrdom of the flesh but by 
kindling of the spirit, was to be altogether transformed 
into the likeness of Christ crucified." And so they be- 
lieve, w^hether through the reactions of his own inflamed 
soul, or by rays shot from the flaming seraph of his vis- 
ion, or by the invisible hands of the Master, to whom he 
was to be conformed, there came in his very flesh the five 
w^ounds w^hich w^ere signs and seals of his superhuman 
sanctity. 

Of this stigmatization of St. Francis, there are three, 
or even four, what may be called contemporaneous ac- 
counts. The first is by Celano, writing three years after 
his death, who, relating the vision, adds, " And when he 
could find nothing by which it might be understood, and 
the novelty of the vision overwhelmed his heart, there 
begun to appear in his hands and feet signs of nails such 
as he had just seen in the Holy Crucified One who stood 
over him." Tlie three companions who wrote his biog- 



196 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

rapby twenty years after Lis death, two of tliem reported 
to have been at Monte Alverno with him, say, " When 
this vision disappeared, a wonderful ardor of love re- 
mained in his soul ; and in his flesh still more marvellously 
appeared the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ, which 
the man of God carried concealed to his death, not wish- 
ing to publish the secret of God." Bonaventura writes 
thirty-seven years after, and uses nearly the same lan- 
guage : " Immediately on his hands and feet there began 
to appear the marks of nails, just as he had but a little 
before seen them in the form of the Crucified One." Be- 
sides these testimonies, there is the letter of Elias, the 
Yicar General of the order, which he wrote at once to the 
brethren in France, announcing the death of Francis, in 
which he says : — - 

I announce to you a great joy, and a great miracle ; the world 
has never seen such a wonder, except in the person of the Son 
o£ God. A short time before his death, our brother and father 
appeared as one crucified, having in his body five wounds which 
are truly the stigmata of Christ ; for his feet and hands had, 
as it were, the marks of nails fixed in the flesh, keeping the 
scars and showing the blackness of iron, while the side seemed 
pierced with a lance and bled frequently. 

Here is a story told by four persons, living, all but one 
of them, at the time, and one of them relating it very soon 
after its alleged occurrence. Did they invent it ? Was 
it imposed upon them? Did they have opportunity to 
verify it ? Did they believe it ? Was it a fact ? If it 
was, did Elias fabricate the thing as well as the story, 
manufacturing a miracle for the glory of the saints and 
the promotion of the order ? Hase, the German historian, 
thinks so, finding evidence of it in his letter, from which 
the whole story sprung. If it was a fact, could it have 
been simply the imaginative exaggeration of accidental 
scars produced by natural causes ? If it was a fact, could 
Francis himself, so visionary, so realistic, with a religion 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 197 

SO sensuous and yet so mystical, from a desire to be made 
in his very person like Christ, in a passionate frenzy of 
devotion have inflicted upon himself wounds which came 
to light only after his death, but which made him in these 
last two years appear like a man bearing about in his body 
the death of the Lord Jesus, his life ebbing as from a se- 
cret wound, and overshadowed by a mystery which came 
down upon it there in the solitude of the Apennines ? If 
it was a fact, was it one of the involuntary products of 
a peculiar mental and physical organization ; of their re- 
action, which alone can account for trances and other 
physical anomalies of periods of high religious excitement ? 
Or shall we overleap the Horatian maxim, Nee Deus 
intersit, nisi vindice nodus i?iciderit, and boldly say that 
it was the actual stamp of God upon his servant — a mira- 
cle ? Before going so far it would be more reasonable to 
assay the story and sift the evidence on which it rests. 
The genius for manufacturing such tales of wonder was 
not wanting, and they grew very easily out of a very small 
germ of fact. It only needs one wonder-seeing eye to 
magnify appearance into reality ; the rest are ready to be- 
lieve it and to tell it. The Aberglaube makes up for 
evidence. That the story might not lack authority, how- 
ever, Gregory IX. took it under his protection, and what 
was doubtful, according to the laws of evidence, was made 
certain by three bulls from the infallible head of the 
Church. Alexander IV. decreed excommunication against 
whoever denied it, and that absolution for the offense 
should be granted only by the Pope. Soon fanatical 
veneration for Francis carried the idea of conformity be- 
tween him and Christ to almost blasphemous extremes. 
Says Dean Milman : ^ — 

Up to a certain period, this studious conformity of the life of 
St. Francis with that of Christ, heightened, adorned, expanded, 

1 Latin Christianity, vi. 39, 40. Compare Robertson's History of 



198 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

till it received its perfect form in the work of Bartholomew 
of Pisa, and was promulgated by the emulous zeal of a host of 
disciples throughout the world. With the Franciscans, and 
all under the dominion of the Franciscans, the lower orders 
throughout Christendom, there was thus almost a second Gos- 
pel, a second Redeemer, who could not but throw back the one 
Saviour into more awful obscurity. The worship of St. Francis 
in prayer, in picture, vied with that of Christ ; if it led perhaps 
a few up to Christ, it kept the multitude fixed upon itself. 

At last the end came. His will was written. His bless- 
ing was put upon his first proselyte, Bernard de Quinta- 
valle, and upon Elias, his successor as general minister of 
the order. By his direction they laid him, stripped of his 
habit, upon the bare ground, as if to complete his renun- 
ciation of the world. The sun was going down behind the 
hills in the calm beauty and peace of an autumn evening 
in Italy, as with waning breath and faltering voice he 
could be heard saying the words of the CXLiid Psalm, 
Voce mea ad Dominuin clamavi^ — " With my voice I 
have cried unto the Lord." In the still cell, his brethren 
could hear the last faint whisper, " Bring my soul out of 
prison, that I may praise thy name," and his emancipa- 
tion came. It was Saturday, October 4, 1226, and the 
day has been made sacred forever in the Roman calendar. 
In two years after he was canonized, and in May, 1230, 
his remains were deposited in the magnificent church at 
Assisi, which was built to receive them, and afterwards 
adorned with the frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto. And 
henceforth the little town on the hills of Umbria sends its 
name into all the earth, on the wings of the greater name 
of St. Francis of Assisi. 

St. Francis was an enthusiast, a mystic, an ascetic. He 
was a seraphic simpleton, the one element or the other 
predominating, according -as he was regarded with sym- 
pathy or with contempt. He believed what he believed 
with a most realistic faith ; and the visions of his imagina- 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 199 

tion became the facts of liis life. While he indulged in 
melancholy as his chief luxury, he was kindled sometimes 
into the loftiest ecstasies. An anchorite, practicing the 
most rigid austerities, he yet loved nature ; not as a poet, 
but with such sympathy that he called not lambs and 
swallows only, but fire and water, the sun and moon, his 
brothers and sisters. He was a poet, too ; one of the first 
of the vernacular poets in that Italian tongue which, be- 
fore long, Dante was to cast into an immortal mould. A 
reformer and a saint, he was gentle and meek ; not stern 
like Dominic, but tender, with human as well as divine 
love. He was more strict with himself than with others. 
He abased himself before God ; and it was revealed to one 
of the brethren that the throne of one of the angels who 
fell from pride was reserved for Francis on account of his 
humility. He seems to have been an enthusiast, without 
genius, without learning; who, by making absolute pov- 
erty a religion, struck a want of his age, and by the force 
of religious fervor carried it captive. 

There is a story, which has some air of subsequent in- 
vention, that Francis was in Rome in 1216, and there by 
accident met Dominic, the founder of the other order of 
mendicants. The Dominicans relate that their saint, 
while at prayer, saw in a vision our Lord rise from the 
right hand of the Father, armed with three lances, to de- 
stroy sinners who had provoked his wrath. Upon this the 
dreamer aaw the Virgin Mother rise and plead for them, 
declaring that she had two faithful servants whom she 
should send out to preach to them ; one of whom was 
Dominic himself; the other a poor man, in mean dress, 
whom he had never seen before, but whom the next morn- 
ing he saw and recognized and embraced in church. 

So much, at least, is true : that these two men, of dif- 
ferent countries, and very unlike in temper and training, 
had simultaneously and without concert started movements 
very similar in purpose, and naturally came to the capital 



200 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

of Christendom, each in the interest of his order. One 
was an Italian, mystical, fervid, genial even in his asceti- 
cism ; a layman smitten with the love of Christ and an 
enthusiasm for poverty ; a mediaeval Methodist, who 
kindled a new devotion in the popular heart. The other 
was a Spaniard, a countryman of Cortez and Ignatius 
Loyola, a trained theologian, an ecclesiastic, with more 
intellect and less poetry ; with an enthusiasm as profound, 
but less genial ; with even more inflexible purpose, and 
keener sagacity. The one would burn heretics for the 
glory of God ; the other would be burned himself for their 
salvation. Both were earnest ; the one to fierceness, the 
other to ecstasy. Both were fanatics ; but Francis was 
the fanatic of love, Dominic the fanatic of wrath. Both 
saw the defect of the old monastic life, and founded their 
orders in a poverty which was beggary ; identifying reli- 
gion, the highest spiritual perfection, with the basest out- 
ward condition, with utter mendicancy. Both saw, with 
more or less clearness, the necessities of the Church, and 
selected, as if by common instinct, the weapons by which 
its enemies were to be conquered. 

Dominic was born in 1170 at Calaroga, a village in Old 
Castile, of the noble name, if not the noble family, of 
Guzman. His mother dreamed beforehand that she gave 
birth to a dog with a blazing torch in his mouth, which 
set the world on tire. When he was but a child he would 
creep out of his bed and sleep on the cold ground for pen- 
ance. When he was older he flogged himself every night 
with an iron chain, once for his own sins, once for the 
sinners in this world, and once for those in purgatory. 
While a student at the university, he sold his books to 
relieve the distressed, and even offered to sell himself to 
redeem a man from slavery to the Moors. But to heretics 
he was unrelenting ; as Dante says, " Kind to his own, 
and cruel to his foes." ^ 

^ Paradiso, xii. 57. 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 201 

After ten years in the university, he was made canon of 
the Cathedral by Diego, Bishop of Osma. The two men 
were of congenial spirit. A journey for the king took 
them into the south of France, the seat of the Albigensian 
heresy. They saw the dangers of the Church when the 
clergy were in contempt for their worldliness, and the 
heretics were the most energetic Christians. They went 
to Rome, and on their return encountered, at Montpellier, 
the PajDal legates who were trying with small success to 
reduce heresy. "How expect to succeed in this secular 
style ?" they said. " This is not the way the heretics win, 
riding on palfreys, with gay cavalcades and gorgeous ap- 
parel. You must go barefoot, and put on humility, and 
live austerely, and preach and pray more and better than 
they, if you would beat them on their own ground." 
And they set the example, which for a time the legates 
followed, though with small effect. They soon called in 
the sword, and bloody they made it. They set up the 
Inquisition, and made that more cruel than war. How 
much part in this atrocious business Dominic had, is not 
clear. Sixtus V. thought to honor him by claiming for 
him the establishment of the Inquisition, and his earlier 
followers vaunted what his later eulogists have tried to 
soften or conceal. The atrocities which he did not stimu- 
late he did not check. If he did not originate the Inqui- 
sition,,or fight in the Crusade, his Spirit was in both. His 
preaching sustained the one, and his brotherhood were the 
most merciless administrators of the other. He received 
the title of Persecutor of Heretics, which the Bollandists 
at least count his glory only in the fiercest sense. But 
his glories as a persecutor or a saint are the invention of 
a later age, when his order had become famous and per- 
secuting, and its founder must be made worthy of it. His 
experience in Languedoc had given him the idea of a 
theological seminary, or society of preachers, who were to 
be trained and consecrated, not to the priesthood, or to 



202 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

monastic life, but to the special work of confuting here- 
tics, and converting men to the faith by preaching. He 
formed such a fraternity at Toulouse. With the Bishop 
of Toulouse he went to the Lateran Council in 1215 to 
seek the sanction of Innocent III. The Pope was at first 
disinclined, but was brought round by a convenient dream 
(or better advice), as in the case of Francis. Only he re- 
quired Dominic to comply with the canon of the council 
against new orders, and the new fraternity of preachers 
was put under the rule of St. Augustine, made more 
stringent. Dominic was not content with suppressing 
heresy in Languedoc. He had a larger ambition. Per- 
haps he saw that preaching had less chance than the 
sword. In two years, at the beginning of a new pontifi- 
cate, he went up to Kome. Honorius III. made him Mas- 
ter of the Sacred Palace, an office held ever since by a 
Dominican, to which was afterwards added the censorship 
of books. He gave him the Church of St. Sabina on the 
Aventine, which became the headquarters of his order. 
His preaching drew admirers and disciples among the pil- 
grims to Rome. Preachers multiplied, and from Cracow 
to Oxford their voices were heard in every language of 
Christendom. He had early, like Francis, instituted an 
order of nuns. He had also, like the Franciscans, a third 
order of lay coadjutors, not under vows, but devoted to 
the interests of his order, and imbued with its spirit. 
They were the militia of the Church, and he called them 
the soldiers of Jesus Christ. At the first general chapter 
of their order at Bologna, in 1220, it was found to be 
necessary, for prudence if not for principle, if they were 
to compete with the Franciscans, to adopt from them the 
rule of absolute poverty. St. Dominic has also been 
credited with the invention of the Rosary, — that very 
needful arithmetical device for keeping account of Pater 
Nosters and Ave Marias, when so much virtue lies in their 
frequent repetition. So that " by this simple expedient," 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 203 

Mrs. Jameson says, " lie did more to excite the devotion 
of the lower orders, especially of the women, than by all 
his orthodoxy, learning, arguments, and eloquence."^ If 
not his, it is a Dominican invention, though the method 
can be traced to a much earlier time, and even to other 
religions. After the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, Gregory 
XIII. instituted the Festival of the Rosary, to commemo- 
rate that victory over the Infidels ; and Madonnas of the 
Ilosary, or Dominic receiving the Rosary, became the 
great subject of art, at least in the Dominican churches. 
He had hardly passed fifty when he was seized with a 
fever at Venice, and being carried to Bologna, died there 
August 6, 1221. He was canonized very soon by Greg- 
ory IX. Among the attractions of Bologna is the 
splendid church where his remains are enshrined, with its 
wonderful tomb by Nicolas of Pisa, and its magnificent 
chapel dedicated to the Madonna del Rosario. 

Suor Cecilia, one of his Roman disciples, has given us 
his portrait : -— 

In stature he was of moderate size ; his features regular and 
handsome ; his complexion fair, with a slight color in his cheek ; 
his hair and beard inclining to red, and in general he kept his 
beard close-shaven ; his eyes were blue, brilliant, and penetrat- 
ing ; his hands were long, and remarkable for their beauty ; the 
tones of his voice sweet, and at the same time powerful and 
sonorous. He was always placid, and even cheerful, except 
when moved to compassion.^ 

In pictures he always wears the white tunic and scapu- 
lary, with the hooded long black cloak, the proper habit 
of his order. In one hand is a lily, in the other a book, 
and by his side the dog with a flaming torch in his 
mouth. 

Says Robert Southey : ' — 

1 Monastic Orders, 402. 
. 2 Legends of Monastic Orders, 403. 
^ Common-Place Book, ii. 397. 



204 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

Domingo is the only saint in whom no solitary speck of good- 
ness can be discovered. To impose privations and pain seems 
to have been the pleasure of his unnatural heart ; and cruelty 
was in him an appetite and a passion. No other human being 
has ever been the occasion of so much human misery. . . . The 
few traits of his character which can be gleaned from the lying 
columns of his biographers are all of the darkest colors. 

This is hard judgment. But what is to be expected ? 
An ascetic from childhood, in whose nature every human 
affection has been suppressed, who, it is claimed, never 
looked a woman in the face, with no family, no country, 
nothing to love, with a will which nothing could bend, his 
very religion turned into spiritual arrogance, into revenge 
against different opinions, into hatred, and the fanaticism 
of an irritated and malignant intolerance, he may make a 
good executioner of the Church's vengeance, he may be 
an " angelical doctor," and the stern Dante may put him 
among the cherubim whose swords guard Paradise ; but 
such men show what bitterness can be extracted from a 
mistaken faith, and that the sensualist and miscreant may 
be matched by the ascetic and the devotee. 

These two great orders were now started on their career 
of growth and conflict. It was one of remarkable growth 
and of mighty influence. It was an absurd system of 
sanctified beggary, and yet it had power. It was nimble 
and itinerant. It was animated with ardor and energy. 
It spread rapidly. It dispensed with costly buildings. 
It roused men by preaching. It took hold of the rich and 
the poor alike. Through confession it held the one ; 
through its order of Tertiaries it enlisted the other. The 
friars lived on alms, and came in contact with the lowest 
as well as the highest. They had privileges which ex- 
alted them above the regular clergy, and they appropriated 
their offices more and more to themselves. The spiritual 
destitution of great towns attracted them, and seemed to 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 205 

give a place, as well as a reason, for the order. Says 
Mr. Green : ^ — 

To the towns especially, the coming of the friars was a reli- 
gions revolution. They had been left for the most part to the 
worst and most ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose 
sole subsistence lay in his fees. Burgher and artisan were left 
to spell out what religious instruction they might from the gor- 
geous ceremonies of the Church's ritual, or the Scriptural pic- 
tures and sculptures which were graven on the walls of its min- 
sters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which 
welcomed the itinerant preacher, whose fervid appeal, coarse 
wit, and familiar story brought religion into the fair and the 
market-place. The Black friars of Dominic, the Gray friars of 
Francis, were received with the same delight. 

In England the Franciscans sought the worst quarters 
of the towns, and as their Master cared for lepers, they 
counted no phj^sical or moral defilement too gross for their 
self-denying ministry .^ Both orders gained access to the 
rich and the dying, and were the universal legatees. 
They were united with the Papal court by reciprocal in- 
terests, and generally had the popes to sustain them in the 
quarrels which they were sure by their aggressiveness to 
provoke. The older orders were jealous of them, and the 
clergy and the universities resisted their encroachments. 
They soon degenerated themselves. Matthew Paris, an 
English Benedictine of the thirteenth century, bitterly ar- 
raigns them, and declares that in less than half a century 
the mendicants had degenerated more than the ancient 
monastic orders in three or even four hundred years.^ 
The Dominicans early adopted mendicancy. The Fran- 
ciscans soon emulated the Dominicans in their ambition 
for learning, and had scholars, and fine churches, and bish- 

1 Short History of English People, 145. 

2 Monumenta Franciscana. The Preface, though highly eulogistic 
of the order, contains striking pictures of its early character in Eng- 
land. 

^ Matthew Paris's Chronicle, i. 475 (Bohn's ed.). 



206 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

ops, and both orders besieged the University of Paris, 
till in 1257 it was obliged to give the Doctor's degree to 
the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Bo- 
naventura. But the university held a bold fight against 
them, and its champion, William of St. Amour, assailed 
the whole system of mendicancy with vigorous and most 
effective eloquence. They were soon at discord with each 
other, and differences in doctrines subsequently widened 
and perpetuated the breach. The Franciscans paid almost 
idolatrous veneration to their founder, while the Domin- 
icans derided the story of his stigmatization. The Domin- 
icans were nominalists, the Franciscans realists. The 
Dominicans, under the lead of their great light, Aquinas, 
were Augustinians ; and the Franciscans, under Scotus, 
were semi-Pelagian. The doctrine of the immaculate con- 
ception of the Virgin, affirmed in our own day as a neces- 
sary article of the Koman faith, was advocated by the 
Franciscans, and as strenuously opposed by the Domin- 
icans. But with all their differences the world was por- 
tioned between them. The universities succumbed. Scho- 
lasticism rested on their shoulders. The great schoolmen 
were mendicants. Before the century ends, the simple 
preaching of Francis and Dominic is followed by the 
metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. The 
Black friars and the Gray friars monopolize the learning 
of Christendom. Stranger than this, a movement which 
aspired to identify Christianity with the meanest poverty, 
whose rule disowned all property, whose preachers went 
barefoot and subsisted on alms, is followed by and ap- 
parently stimulates the vernal season of Italian art. The 
highest luxuries of princes are in the houses of mendi- 
cants. The genius for painting, as well as for philosophy, 
is found under a friar's cowl. For three hundred years 
the great arists of Italy were employed in decorating the 
church at Assisi, where Francis wandered a self-denying 
pauper. The marvellous paint of Murillo was purchased 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 207 

by the Franciscans of Seville, and for tlie Dominicans 
Titian painted the Peter Martyr, burned before our own 
eyes, and Leonardo his Last Supper, as surely, though 
more slowly, consuming out of human sight. Their con- 
vent of St. Mark, at Florence, is illustrated by the saintly 
pencils of Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolomeo, no less than 
by the preaching and the martyrdom of Savonarola. The 
two great hymns of the Middle Age, if not of all ages, the 
Dies Irse and the Stabat Mater, came fi-om Franciscan 
cells. 

Before St. Francis died, there were the beginnings of 
relaxation in his rule which were to issue in schism. 
Elias, who became Master of the order, mitigated its 
requirements on the ground that everybody was not ex- 
pected to be a Francis. Knowing that with all the won- 
ders told of him the saint was not likely to come back, he 
at once projected a church to cover him, every splendid 
stone of whicli would have been overturned had the soul 
still remained in the dead body underneath. In his will, 
written on his death-bed, Francis had enjoined that the 
brethren should demand no privilege of the court of 
Rome ; and yet in four years Gregory IX. relaxed the 
rule, declaring that the founder could not bind his suc- 
cessors ; and fifteen years later. Innocent TV. relaxed it 
yet further, under the ingenious pretense that the prop- 
erty of the order belonged to the Apostolic See, and they 
might have all they could get, so long as the fee was with 
him and they only had the use of it. But all the time a 
stricter party was insisting on utter poverty, and becoming 
alienated from the Papacy itself. It was an inevitable 
question, this of the possession of property. It was in- 
evitable that it should be given to them, and, with human 
nature as it is, it was inevitable that a part of them should 
want to keep it. It was the old, the eternal battle in all 
churches, in all orders, of the liberal and the strict, of 
stiff adherence to primitive patterns, and of elastic ac- 



208 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

commodation to new times. A part wanted learning, and 
art, and position, and power, and to have them reconciled 
somehow with the Franciscan creed. The spiritualists dis- 
dained such a compromise. They wanted no relaxation, 
and began to hate the Papacy because it was granted. 
And this made trouble. So long as it was civil war 
within the order itself, what matter ? But the party of 
strict observance were the stuff of which the sectaries, 
the insurgents against the hierarchy, had always been 
made. They chafed under the looser interpretation of 
the ride of absolute poverty. They wanted to keep Fran- 
ciscanism poor and democratic. They were enthusiasts 
for poverty as the height of Christian perfection. They 
were blind idolaters of St. Francis. And to such enthusi- 
asts nothing could be more welcome than the everlasting- 
Gospel and the prophetic dreams of the abbot Joachim, 
and John Peter Oliva. For, preceding the outbreak of 
the spirit which produced the mendicant orders, there had 
been an eruption of what might be called a prophetic 
spirit, which came to greater clearness in Joachim, abbot 
of Flora, whose ideas were readily appropriated by the 
stricter Minorites. For he seemed to them to have an- 
ticipated their order, and the new dispensation of religion, 
and the regeneration of the Church which they were to 
introduce. His idea of successive stages in religion, and 
of a new dispensation of the Holy Spirit, of an everlast- 
ing Gospel to supersede the transitory one, was appropri- 
ated by the Fraticelli and the rigid Franciscans, and by 
them pushed so far that they thought the new era of the 
Holy Ghost had come, or was near at hand. They saw, 
of course, in the corruptions of the Church, the omens of 
it, and these corruptions were measured by the Franciscan 
rule of absolute poverty as necessary to spiritual perfec- 
tion. At the end of the century, Oliva continued these 
apocalyptic revelations of a new order of things, in which 
the corrupt hierarchy was to pass away, and faith in St. 
Francis and his rule was to be universal. 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 209 

At last John XXII. rose upon them in his wrath. He 
denounced them in bulls. He handed them over to the 
Inquisition, which the Dominicans were not likely to 
soften for their sake. As he had begun, he thought he 
would finish. He pounced upon the dogmas, so dear to 
the Minorites, of the absolute poverty of Christ and the 
apostles. He exposed the legal fiction by which his pre- 
decessors had held the possessions of the order. He re- 
tracted all title to their property, and rejected the Fran- 
ciscan dogma as heresy, so that the fee remained with the 
donors, and they enjoyed the usufruct. And so by neces- 
sity the observance of the rule of St. Francis was still 
further relaxed ; and so by necessity the spirituals were 
still less reconciled to the order ; though the Council of 
Constance at length appeased them by recognizing them 
as Brethren of the Regular Observance, and they gradu- 
ally acquired privileges above the more lax Conventuals, 
as they were called. The more they relaxed the severe 
rule of St. Francis, so much the more they exaggerated 
his praises, as if to propitiate him ; and so much the more 
extravagant and profane their comparisons of their saint 
with Christ. The Dominicans, with the Inquisition, and 
the care of souls among the higher ranks, were fast losing 
the marks of a mendicant order ; while the Franciscans 
still sought influence among the people. With the Uni- 
versity of Paris, and the secular clergy, the mendicants 
were in ceaseless struggle, while they were the faithful 
servants of the Popes, from whom their privileges were 
derived. 

In England they sought to capture the universities, as 
in France ; and there they provoked the satire of Piers 
Ploughman, the laughter of Chaucer, the indignation of 
Wycliife. The Reformation came, and they even fur- 
nished their contingents for that. The purer spirits 
among them hailed it, and became its heralds. If the 

14 



210 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

Dominican, Tetzel, provoked it, the Augustinian, Luther, 
preached it. Says Mr. Hardwick : ^ — 

Immediately after the promulgation of the Edict of Worms, 
we find a host of itinerant friars, Dominicans, Augustinians, 
and, most of all, perhaps, Franciscans, ardently declaiming in 
the cause of Luther ; the only effect of their expulsion from 
one town or village being to scatter seeds of Protestantism in 
many others, far and wide. 

But the Keformation suppressed them in half of Eu- 
rope ; and yet at the beginning of the eighteenth century 
the Franciscans had seven thousand convents, with one 
hundred and fifteen thousand friars. In 1862, they report 
three thousand six hundred houses, with fifty thousand 
members. Other causes have diminished the Dominicans 
in numbers and influence. By the Reformation they lost 
like the Franciscans. The Inquisition was a stain upon 
them. And after the Reformation they were replaced by 
the Jesuits. Thirty years ago, Lacordaire brought back for 
a time the old glory of Dominican preaching, and tried to 
revive the order in France ; and it is said to be increasing. 
In 1862 it reports three hundred and sixty houses, with 
four thousand members. But the doom of decline, which 
overtook these as well as other monastic institutions with 
the coming of an age so different from that in which they 
were born, is not likely to be reversed. They have already 
long survived their vocation and any good use. The 
manners no less than the religion, the political economy 
as well as the Gospel, the whole tone and tendency of our 
civilization are against beggary ; and no poetry can gild 
it, and no piety can sanctify it. If in our education, and 
our religion there are eleemosynary features which suggest 
mendicancy, they are more likely to be eliminated than 
continued. 

And yet who can say that the reaction will not come, 

1 Church History, i. 79. 



THE MENDICANT ORDERS. 211 

and that religion, falling' under bondage to money, and in- 
terpreting the Gospel by Adam Smith rather than by St. 
Paul or St. Francis, will not, for its very salvation, again 
renounce all things for the sake of likeness to its Divine 
Leader, who had not where to lay his head ? If it is to 
be a minister to human want and misery, it will have to 
adapt itself to the poor and the wretched. It is the les- 
son of hope we learn, as we go back into that thirteenth 
century into which our story has led, that religion has 
its reserves waiting for their hour ; that the Church has 
in her bosom latent powers of self-restoration and new 
conquest ; that in the time of danger God has his elect 
spirits, nobly touched to noble issues ; and when the need 
is greatest, the hour and the man, the preacher and the 
hearer, the new truth and the waiting faith, the crying 
necessity and the reserved help, the rescue, the renewal, the 
reformation, the better method, the profounder thought, 
the medicine for a thousand evils, the drill into an artesian 
well, the Benedict, the Francis, the Luther, the Wesley, 
the Loyola come, and come unexpectedly, as if dropped 
out of heaven. 

There is a lesson, too, of the power there is in preach- 
ing, if you will, no matter what you call it, in the word of 
man to man, of a poor, self-renouncing man, with the fire 
of God in his soul ; in these spiritual democrats, who 
wanted no ritual, who went barefoot, and asked nothing 
but men's ears ; who fell back on that original ordinance 
which precedes all others, the first of sacraments, the 
thing which Jesus did, which Paul did, which every orator 
does according to his occasions, the speech of man to man, 
the preaching of such truth as is given to such hearers as 
are given, and which helped make the friars the power 
they were. Printing will not displace it ; civilization will 
not outgrow it. Religion will always need it, and always 
use it, and never in vain. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR.i 

Some books have a natural lougevity. Tliey are not of 
a merely temporary or local use, but have a vitality and 
enduring power in them which carries them beyond the 
time in which they are born. They live and keep their 
hold in virtue of a truth in them over which change and 
time have no power. But most books are written for 
their day, and expire with it. They have their use for a 
season ; but the world soon gets beyond them. Their 
office is finished, and they are left behind, dropped out of 
the living thoughts and present uses of men, and at length 
out of their memories. The dead literature of the world 
— not only the useless which is known to antiquaries, but 
that which is absolutely dead and vanished forever — it is 
almost fearful to contemplate. It contained the purest 
efficacy and extraction of living intellects ; but not a trace 
of it is left. And that which has managed to survive has 
much of it only the dried, preserved life of the mummy, 
and is kept for antiquarian curiosity rather than for any 
real human service. And yet many of these books have 
an historical value beyond their intrinsic worth, so that 
they come to resurrection, and a new though limited use 
on this account. Such resurrections have become quite 
common of late years, with the multiplication of historical 
students and the increased vigor given to historical in- 
quiry. A large number of works belonging to the initial 
periods of American history have been recovered from 

1 Published in the Baptist Quarterly, vol. vi. 

Publications of the Narraganset Club, volumes i.-iv. Providence, 
R. I., 1866-1870. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 213 

oblivion. Some, like the manuscript of Bradford's " His- 
tory of Plymouth," have been recovered after long disap- 
pearance.^ Some, of excessive rarity, whose existence de- 
pended on the preservation of a single copy, have been re- 
produced in sufficient number to make them accessible to 
all historical students, and perhaps to insure them against 
any future extinction. The more important works, like 
Winthrop's " New England," Morton's " Memorial," and 
later Bradford's " Plymouth," with such documents as 
were gathered up in Rev. Alexander Young's " Chronicles 
of the Pilgrims and of Massachusetts Bay," and the Colo- 
nial Records of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, 
and Connecticut, have been followed by the exact reprint 
of some of the rarest tracts and volumes, such as Mourt's 
"Relation," Lechford's "Plain Dealing," Wood's "New 
England's Prospect," and Johnson's " Wonder-working 
Providence." To these are to be added the " Publications 
of the Narraganset Club," of which four large and hand- 
some volumes have already appeared. The club has un- 
dertaken to issue a literal reprint of the works of Roger 
Williams, reproducing the minutest errors of the press, 

1 " This inestimable book, after being lost for nearly ninety years, 
was found in 1855, in the Episcopal library at Fulhara, and has since, 
through the kindness of the late Bishop of London, been published 
by the Massachusetts Historical Society. The manuscript was 
known to have been used by Morton, Prince, and Hutchinson in the 
composition of their works. What was its fate after Hutchinson's 
publication of his second volume, in 1767, remained unknown. In 
1849 Bishop Wilberforce, in his History of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church in America, referred to a "manuscript history of the Planta- 
tion of Plymouth in the Fulham library." The identity of the quota- 
tions from it with language preserved by Morton and Prince led to 
the belief that it was Bradford's lost history, which on examination it 
proved to be. When Prince used it in 1736 it belonged to the library 
kept in the tower of the Old South Church, in Boston. In 1775 that 
church was occupied as a riding-school for the British cavalry ; and 
then it was, probably, that the book was taken away and carried to 
England." — Palfrey, History of New England^ i. 136. 



214 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

the ipsissima ve7'ba of the original edition. All his ex 
tant works, except three, have already appeared, carefully 
edited, together with one of John Cotton's intimately con- 
nected with them. 

It is proposed to give some account of these works, and 
a review of Williams as an author. Writing books was 
not his profession, was rather the accident of a very busy 
life. His great work was the Providence Plantation. 
Having founded Rhode Island on a principle which, then 
first incorporated into a civil polity, has been ever since 
working its way into the law of all civilized states, he 
needs and could take little additional honor from any per- 
formances of his pen. By this he would be known to the 
last syllable of recorded time, though his books had sunk 
into Lethe and disappeared, as until quite recently seemed 
likely to be their fate. It is nearly two hundred years 
since his last work, written when he was beyond three- 
score and ten, was printed. It is not probable that any 
large number of copies of either was published. The first 
edition of one of them was burned by the public execu- 
tioner. They were all, with a single exception, printed in 
England, where the interest in them could not long con- 
tinue. But a few copies strayed across the sea ; and so 
the doom of neglect, and then of destruction, which comes 
upon all printed matter which has not present and per- 
petual interest, soon overtook them. Of one no copy has 
so far been found. Two others are supposed not to have 
been printed, certainly have never been found. Another 
has been discovered only within a few years. And of any 
one of them probably there were not more than five copies 
on this side of the Atlantic. The one published latest, 
and in Boston, is quite as rare as any. Exposed to such 
risks of total loss, and inaccessible to general readers and 
even to scholars, their republication is a valuable service. 
And because even the republication is in few hands, being 
limited in the last volume to one hundred and seventy 
copies, some account of them may be of similar service. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 215 

We have very little, we might say the least possible, 
knowledge of the sources from which Williams drew his 
intellectual nurture. We have his own word for his early 
religious training where he says, " From my childhood 
the Father of lights and mercies toucht my soul with a 
love to himself, to his only begotten, the true Lord Jesus, 
and to his Holy Scriptures." ^ In 1632, when he was 
about thirty-three years old, writing to Governor Win- 
throp from Plymoutli, he speaks of himself as "but a 
child in everything, (though in Christ called^ and perse- 
cuted even in and out of my father's house these twenty 
years.''^)'^ The testimony of Mrs. Sadleir and the records 
of the Charter House School show that he was a scholar 
there under the patronage of Sir Edward Coke. The rec- 
ords of Pembroke College, Cambridge, indicate that he 
sought his education at Coke's own university, where so 
many of the Puritan divines who came to New England 
were graduated.^ He has also incidentally revealed his 
intercourse with Cotton and Hooker while the three were 
in England ; that even then he was more separatist in 
opinion than they, while probably exercising his ministry 
in the same neighborhood;* "that Bishop Laud pursued 
him out of the land " because his " conscience was per- 
suaded against the national Church ;" ^ and, in a word, 
that he felt the full force of the intellectual and spiritual 
ferment going on around him. 

It is an interesting question how far his works show 
Williams to have been of a liberal education. A score 
of years after leaving England, when on his second visit 
there, he says, " It pleased the Lord to call me for some 
time, and with some persons to practise the Hebrew, the 

1 Fox Digged out of Burrowes, Pref ., p. 3. 

2 4 Massachusetts Historical Collections, vi. 184. 

3 Arnold, History of Rhode Island, i. 47. 

■* Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, 12 ; P. N. C, iv. 65. 
5 Letter to Mrs. Sadleir ; Elton, Life, 89. 



216 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

Greek, Latin, Frencli, and Dutch." ^ These even in our 
day may be counted a good linguistic furnishing. But 
his writings do not indicate that he was a learned man, 
as compared for instance with Cotton, or judged by the 
theological works of the time. Of course it is not to be 
forgotten that, instead of spending his days in a settled 
ministry at Salem, as Cotton did in Boston, or over thirty 
of his earlier years in learned pursuits in the mother 
country, as Cotton did, that at once, very early in his 
career, he was driven away from the facilities and oppor- 
tunities of study into an active life, where books were 
few and unscholastic labors abundant. In 1652 he writes : 
*' It is not unknown to many witnesses in Plymouth, 
Salem, and Providence, that the discussers time hath not 
been spent (though as much as any whosoever) altogether 
in spiritual labors, and publike exercise of the word, but 
day and night, at home and abroad, on the land and water, 
at the Plow, at the Oare, for bread." ^ He also writes in 
the same year : " I have^ not been altogether a stranger to 
the learning of the Egyptians. I know what it is to 
study, to preach, to be an Elder, and yet also what it is 
to tug at the oar, to dig with the spade and plow, and to 
labor and travel day and night amongst English and Bar- 
barians." ^ He rarely quotes an author by book and page ; 
and although there are books extant which are claimed to 
have been his property, the presumption is that his library 
was slender. His letters contain occasional Latin phrases, 
and occasionally refer to books he is reading. In 1650 
he writes to John Winthrop, Jr., his conjecture that 
"EiKwv BaortXiKr}, which was published the previous year, 
was written by Bishop Hall, — " the stile is pious and 
acute, very like his," — indicating some acquaintance with 
this Seneca of divines, and that he, like everybody else in 

1 Letter to John Wiuthrop, Jr. ; Knowles, Memoir, 264. 

2 Bloodij Tenet yet more Bloody, 38 ; P. N. C, iv. 103. 
^ Hireling Ministry. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 217 

that age, was familiar with the famous work of Bishop 
Gauden. In 1649 he asks him for " Carpenters Geogra- 
phie, or other discourse about the Earths diurnall mo- 
tion," and afterwards for " a booke lately come over in 
Mr. Pynchon's name wherein is some derogation to the 
blood of Christ." ^ In 1675, when he was an old man, 
John Winthrop, Jr., thanks him for a little volume of 
poetry w^hich Williams had sent him. His letters are 
generally about his business with the Indians and politi- 
cal affairs, with frequent allusions to theological questions ; 
but the references to books and literary matters are infre- 
queut. In the Preface to " The Bloody Tenet " he quotes 
from Bacon's " Essa}^ on Unity in Religion ;" but he was 
w^riting in London, where he would have the works of the 
great philosopher at hand. He quotes directly from the 
Commentaries of Calvin and Beza, but it is more probable 
that he found them in London than in Providence. Twice 
in the " Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody " he refers to Bishop 
Hall and specific passages in his works. He had read Jer- 
emy Taylor's '' Liberty of Prophesying," referring to it in 
the Appendix to the " Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody," and 
in the same year recommending it to the atttention of Mrs. 
Sadleir.2 In the " Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody " he refers 
to the " Creed of Piers Ploughman," by mistake ascribing 
the poem to Chaucer. He quotes from John Speed's " His- 
toric of Great Britaine" (1632) his translation out of Euse- 
bius of the rescript of the Emperor Antoninus, of which 
Williams makes much, but which, as Dean Milman says, 
" is now generally given up as spurious." ^ Foxe's " Acts 
and Monuments," popularly known as ••' The Book of Mar- 
tyrs," seems to have been the book he drew upon chiefly for 
history. Of quotations from the classics we are acquainted 
with but three which are directly made. Once he quotes 

1 4 Massachusetts Historical Collections, vi. 258, 277, 282, 306. 

2 Elton, Life, 97. 

^ History of Christianity, ii. 158. 



218 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

from the Georgics of Virgil in the margin of " The Bloody 
Tenet," ^ where it seems to have been taken from a diction- 
ary rather than from the original. In the " Bloody Tenet " 
he quotes a line from the ninth epigram of Martial, and in 
the Preface to the " Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody " again 
from the thirteenth book, this last time apparently from 
memory, at least not with entire accuracy. The latter 
quotation had done previous service in " The Key to the 
Indian Language." ^ In a letter to John Winthrop, Jr., 
in 1675, is a broken allusion to the parcene suhjectis, de- 
hellare superhos of Yirgil ; twice he likens the union of 
church and state to " Hippocrates twinnes, they are borne 
together, grow up together, laugh together, weep together, 
sicken and die together,"^ a piece of curious allusion 
picked up, probably, outside of the works of the learned 
physician. While, then, his works give some signs of the 
liberal education he had received, they do not disclose 
critical scholarship, or any considerable acquaintance with 
books. His education was sufficient for his ]3lace. His 
knowledge of the Scriptures was sufficient for purposes of 
theological controversy, and seems to have gone beyond 
the English, in the New Testament at least, and probably 
in the Old. 

The earliest literary venture of Williams was one which 
required learning of a peculiar kind, which he alone of 
all scholars in the world possessed. From his first com- 
ing, " even while I lived at Plymouth and Salem," he 
says, he sought a knowledge of the Indian tongue. In 
1632, while living at Plymouth, he writes: "lam no 
Elder in any church, nor ever shall be, if the Lord please 
to grant my desires that I may intend what I long after, 
the natives soules." * He srjs further that he had this in 

1 Puhlications of the Narraganset Club, iii. 102. 

2 Ibid., i. 190. 

8 Bloody Tenet, 189 ; Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, 84 ; P. N. C, 
iii. 333 ; iv. 170. 

^ 4 Massachusetts 'Historical Collections, vi. 184. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 219 

view in coming to Rhode Island. " My soul's desire was, 
to do the natives good, and to that end learn their lan- 
guage, and therefore desired not to be troubled with Eng- 
lish company."^ As early as 1634 Wood, in his "New 
England's Prospect," refers " to one of the English preach- 
ers," who can be no other than Williams, and who " in 
a speciall good intent of doing good to their soules hath 
spent much time in attaining to their language, wherein he 
is so good a proficient, that he can speake to their under- 
standing, and they to his." In 1643 he writes himself : 
" Of later times (out of desire to attaine their language) 
I have run through varieties of intercourses with them day 
and night, summer and winter, by land and sea." ^ He 
also attempted religious discourse with them. " Many 
solemne discourses I have had with all sorts of Nations 
of them," he writes again in 1643, " which from my lips 
many hundreds of times, great numbers of them have 
heard with great delight, and great convictions." ^ Cal- 
lender, in his " Historical Discourse," says that in this effort 
" he was much discouraged especially by (as he thought) 
the insuperable difficulty of preaching Christianity to them 
in their own language, with any propriety, without in- 
spiration." * Mr. Knowles apparently bases this asser- 
tion, where Callender himself may have based it, upon a 
passage in the " Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody," and accepts 
it as true, as Mr. Trumbull, the accomplished editor of the 
" Key," also seemed to do. The passage does not seem to 
us to bear this construction, and we know no sufficient 
ground for the assertion that Williams believed that in- 
spiration, or the miraculous gift of tongues, was needful 
in order to preach the gospel to the Indians. Williams is 
simply sjDeaking of the difficulty of preaching to the In- 
dians, and of their conversion, and says : — 

1 Arnold, History of Rhode Island, i. 97. 

2 Key, Introduction, p. 25. 

^ Publications of the Narraganset Club, i. 85. 
^ Rhode Island Historical Collections, i. 84. 



220 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

I believe that none of the Ministers of New England, nor 
any person in the whole Countrey is able to open the Mysteries 
of Christ Jesus in any proprietie [property, possession] of their 
speech or Language, without which proprietie [property] it can- 
not be imagined that Christ Jesus sent forth his first Apostles or 
Messengers, and without which no people in the World are long 
willing to heare of difficult and heavenly matters. 

" That none is so fitted," he proves first by the testi- 
mony of the natives, and then by his own experience, and 
then adds, " I see not how without constant use, or a Mir- 
acle^ any man is able to attaine to any proprietie of speech 
amongst them, even in common things^ ^ Throughout he 
alleges his own acquaintance with their tongue, and the 
ignorance of the other ministers. That he believed in 
any miraculous or inspired gift for this purpose, is an 
entire misapprehension. He regarded it as the simple 
alternative for knowledge and '^ constant use." 

Having thus for a dozen years not only been familiar 
with the Indians, their language and their life, but having 
made a special study of them, so as " to attaine a proprie- 
tie of their language in common things," in the spring of 
1643 he sailed from New Amsterdam for England. His 
busy mind occupied the weary hours of a sea voyage in 
reducing these accumulations of knowledge to shape. He 
says, " I drew the Materialls in a rude lumpe at sea, as a 
private helpe to my owne memory." On landing he must 
have put his book at once to press, as it was printed before 
September 1? It was entitled " A Key into the Language 
of America," and contained two hundred and twenty-four 
pages. " It is framed chiefly after the Narraganset Dia- 
lect," and besides the copious vocabulary of Indian terms, 
it gives much general information about the religion, man- 
ners, and life of the natives. He considers with a careful 

1 Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody ; P. N. C, iv. 372 ; Fox Digged 
out of Burr owes , Appendix, 43, 45. 

2 3 Massachusetts Historical Collections, viii. 295. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 221 

reserve the question of their origin, finding some affinity 
with the Jews, and yet concluding that he " dare not con- 
jecture in these uncertainties." One is struck with the 
kindly words he continually interposes in their favor, and 
the pleasant impression they have made upon him. He 
cannot forget their kindness in contrast with the harsh- 
ness of his English friends. The book is unique not only 
in its knowledge of the Indian tongue, but as it presents 
Williams in the singular and not altogether successful 
role of a poet. Each one of the thirty-two chapters closes 
with some moral observation and two or three stanzas, 
usually contrasting the Indians and the English in the 
particular of which the chapter treats. For instance, the 
first chapter is "Of Salutation." It closes : — 

From these courteous Salutations Observe in generall : There 
is a savour of civility and courtesie even amongst these wild 
Americans, both amongst themselves and towards strangers. 
More particular : 

1 The courteous Pagan shall condemne 

Uncourteous Englishmen, 
Who live like Foxes, Beares and Wolves, 
Or Lyon in his Den. 

2 Let none sing blessings to their soules, 

For that they courteous are : 
The wild Barbarians with no more 
Thau Nature, goe so farre : 

3 If Natures sons both wild and tame, 

Humane and Courteous be ; 
How ill becomes it Sonnes of God 
To want Humanity ? 

The second chapter is " Of Eating and Entertainment." 
It closes : — 

It is a strange truth that a man shall generally finde more 
free entertainment and refreshing amongst these Barbarians, 
than amongst thousands that call themselves Christians. 

More particular : 



222 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

1 Course bread and water's most their fare ', 

O Englands diet fine, 
Thy cup runs ore with plenteous store 
Of wholesome beare and wine. 

2 Sometimes God gives them Fish or Flesh, 

Yet they're content without ; 
And what comes in, they part to friends 
And strangers round about. 

3 Gods providence is rich to his, 

Let none distressfull be ; 
In wildernesse, in great distresse, 
There Ravens have fed me. 

These are fair specimens of their style and tone, and do 
more honor to Williams's kind heart than to his poetical 
genius. The water diet of the Indians, which he con- 
trasts with the more stimulating drinks of Europe, to his 
kindly disposition seems a sufficient excuse for their use 
of tobacco, even to some excess. He says : - 

They take their Nuttammauog (that is a weake Tobacco) very 
frequently ; yet I never see any take so excessively, as I have 
seen men in Europe ; and yet excesse were more tolerable in 
them, because they want the refreshing of Beare and Wine, 
which God hath vouchsafed Europe.^ 

From which we infer that teetotalism had not yet ar- 
rived in the Providence Plantations. 

The value of these observations on the habits of the 
American Indians is vouched for by Mr. Trumbull, the 
editor of the " Key " in this edition, and the facile jwin- 
ceps among the students of their tongues. He says : — 

They have been so often and so largely drawn upon by later 
writers, that our obligations to their author are almost lost sight 
of, and they are held, as if by prescription, the common prop- 
erty of historians. No account of the aborigines of America, 
no history of New England or of any of its colonies, would 
remain tolerably complete if Roger Williams's contributions 
were withdrawn from its pages. ^ 

1 Key, 45 ; P. N. C, i. 73. 

2 Publications of the Narraganset Cluh, i. 69. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 223 

Indeed, their value was recognized at once in England. 
A number of noblemen and members of Parliament wrote 
soon after to the authorities of Massachusetts, speaking 
of " his great industry and travail in his printed Indian 
labours (the like whereof we have not seen extant from 
any part of America)." ^ To this little book they ascribe 
his success in obtaining the charter, and they make it the 
reason for a request that he should receive more friendly 
treatment from Massachusetts. Their interest in his la- 
bors was not simply philological. All ears were open for 
reports from this strange and heathen people, and espe- 
cially for any signs of their being accessible to Christian 
teaching. Williams had testimony to give : — 

Because this is the great Inquiry of all men, What Indians 
have been converted ? What have the English done in those 
parts ? What hopes of the Indians receiving the knowledge of 
Christ ? I have further treated of these natives of New Eng- 
land and that great point of their Conversion in a little addi- 
tional Discourse.^ 

This w^ork remains undiscovered. Robert Baillie, the 
hard-headed Scotch member of the AVestminster Assem- 
bly, had seen it. He was bitter against the Independents, 
and charged that in New England they were " noted as 
most neglectful of the work of conversion," " only Master 
Williams," he adds, " in the time of his banishment from 
among them, did essay what could be done with those 
desolate souls." He supports his assertion by two ex- 
tracts from Williams's lost discourse.^ 

The controversy between Williams and John Cotton, 
which supplied so large a part of the matter of his other 
books, began early, and closed only with the death of the 
eminent minister of Boston, in the end of 1652. It 
turned in the first instance on the question of separation, 

1 Knowles, 200. 2 j^ey, Preface, 27. 

^ Dissuasive, etc., pp. 10, 11. 



224 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

a question whicli was involved more or less in Williams's 
difficulties with the authorities of Massachusetts, and 
which therefore brought into discussion incidentally the 
causes of his banishment. It is impossible to date its 
actual commencement. Mr. Cotton's letter, with which it 
appears to begin, and which was written not long after 
Williams's " sorrowful winter's flight," is really a criticism 
of some previous letter of Williams's, in which he had 
justified himself in refusing fellowship with the churches 
of Massachusetts Bay.^ This letter was written as " a 
private admonition," and sent to Williams ; but six or 
seven years later, in 1643, it was printed in London with- 
out the author's knowledge. Williams " finding this letter 
publike, by whose procurement," he says, " I know not," 
published, in 1644, his '' formerly intended answer," in a 
book of forty-seven pages, entitled " Mr. Cotton's Letter 
Lately Printed Examined and Answered." To this 
Cotton replied, in a work printed in London, in 1647, of 
one hundred and forty-four pages, called " A Eej)ly to 
Mr. Williams his Examination," and bound in the same 
volume with "The Bloody Tenet Washed." Williams 
did not succeed in having the last word. In the Preface 
to "• The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody," in 1652, he says, 
page 40 : — 

The Examination of this Reply I desired, and intended should 
have been presented ; But the streights of time (being con- 
stantly drunk up by necessary Labours for bread for many de- 
pending on me, the discharge of Engagements, and wanting 
helps of transcribing) I say the streights of time were such, 
that the Examination of that Reply could not together with this, 
be fitted for Publick view, though with the Lord's assistance 
will not delay to follow. 

1 " I haue bene long requested to write my grounds against the 
English preaching, &c., and especially my answers to some reasons of 
Mr. Robinson's for hearing. In the midst of a multitude of barba- 
rous distractions I have fitted some thing to that purpose." — Roger 
Williams to John Winthrop, July, 1G37 : 4 Mass. Hist, Col, vi. 206. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 225 

The question in issue was that of chufch-fellowship, and 
practically how far it should go, and when it should cease. 
It was the question between the Puritan and the separa- 
tist. Cotton was the conservative, Williams the radical. 
Williams refused all fellowship, even so far as to hear the 
ministers of the English Church. Cotton affirmed " that 
those ought to be received into the Church who are Godly 
though they doe not see, nor expressley bewail all the pol- 
lutions in Church-fellowship, Ministery, Worship, Govern- 
ment." Williams denied, and urged an entire renuncia- 
tion of fellowship with the Church of England. While 
he was yet in England he had held discussion with Cotton 
and Hooker, and " presented his argument from Scripture, 
why he durst not joyn with them in their use of Common 
Prayer." ^ In a recently discovered letter to John Cotton, 
of Plymouth, under date of Providence, 25 March, 1671, 
he says : — 

Being unanimously chosen teacher at Boston (before your 
dear father came divers years), I conscientiously refused, and 
withdrew to Plymouth, because I durst not officiate to an un- 
separated people, as upon examination and conference I found 
them to be.^ 

Winthrop states that on his first arrival a warning was 
sent to Salem against him, because "he had refused to 
join with the congregation at Boston because they would 
not make public declaration of repentance for having 
communion with the churches of England while they lived 
there." 3 

He appears to have come to New England a full-blown 
separatist. He considered this the logical conclusion of 
Puritanism. 

I believe [he says] that there hardly hath ever been a consci- 
entious Separatist, who was not first a Puritan ; for (as Mr. Carr 

1 Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, 12 ; P. N. C, iv. 65. 
^ Palfrey, History of New England, i. 406. 
3 Winthrop, i. 53. 
15 



226 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

hath unanswerably proved) the grounds and principles of the 
Puritans against Bishops and Ceremonies, and prophanes of 
people professing Christ, and the necessitie of Christ's flock and 
discipline, must necessarily, if truely followed, lead on to, and 
enforce separation from such wayes, worships, and Worshippers, 
to seek out the true way of God's worship according to Christ 
Jesus. ^ 

Cotton retorted upon him that he had run his principle 
out to its furthest extreme, realizing the fear which Brew- 
ster expressed at Plymouth, that he would " run the same 
course of rigid separation and anabaptistry which Mr. 
John Smith, the rebaptist at Amsterdam, had done." ^ 

When the Churches of New-England tooke just offence at 
sundry of his proceedings, he first renounced communion with 
them all : and because the Church of Salem refused to joyne 
with him in such a groundless censure, he then renounced com- 
munion with Salem also. And then fell off from his Ministery, 
and then from all Church-fellowship, and then from his Bap- 
tisme, (and was himselfe baptized againe) and then from the 
Lord's Supper, and from all Ordinances of Christ dispensed in 
any Church-way, till God shall stirre up himselfe, or some other 
new Apostles to recover and restore all the Ordinances, and 
Churches of Christ out of the mines of Antichristian Apos- 
tasie.^ 

His separatist opinions made him a discordant element 
among the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, and, with the 
views of toleration there prevalent, provoked his exclusion. 
No one can read attentive^ those discussions without dis- 
covering that his views of the church were repugnant to 
those held by the leaders of religious opinion in that for- 
mative era, and also that they must have had an impor- 
tant bearing on the feeling towards him. As soon as he 
landed in Boston he found his opinions unwelcome. In 

1 Reply to Cotton; P. N. C, iv. 97. 

2 Morton, Memorial, 151. 

8 Cotton's Answer; P. N. C, ii. 11. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 227 

Salem they made trouble. Even in Plymouth they dis- 
turbed Brewster, who in Holland had imbibed similar 
sentiments towards the church which had driven him out. 

A subordinate question was also at issue between Wil- 
liams and Cotton, and involved itself in the controversy, 
namely, whether the pronounced separatism of Williams 
was one of the reasons for his banishment. Williams 
affirmed. He stated four charges made by one of the 
magistrates at his trial, one of which was that he held 
" that it is not lawf ull to heare any of the Ministers of 
the Parish Assemblies in England." ^ Cotton traverses 
by alleging that many were known to hold this opinion, 
and yet were " tolerated to live not only in the common- 
wealth, but also in the fellowship of the Churches," which 
by no means proves that Williams, holding it, together 
with other and more offensive opinions, did not suffer on 
account of it. Their exemption did not prove his. In 
deed. Cotton admits that his renouncing communion with 
the churches led the magistrates to think that he could 
not be dealt with " by any Church-way," " and this was 
the occasion which hastened the Sentence of his Banish- 
ment upon the former grounds." ^ 

Cotton took occasion in his " Answer " to vent some 
sharp criticisms upon the spirit of Williams, and to charge 
upon him an immoderate ambition, which tempted him 
especially " to rise up against the choisest Ornaments of 
two populous Nations, England and Scotland, the reverend 
Assembly of Divines, together with the reverend brethren 
of the Apology ; and above them all to addresse himselfe 
(according to his high thoughts) to propound Quaeries of 
high coDcernment (as he calleth them) to the High and 
Honorable Court of Parliament." ^ This refers to a tract 
of thirteen pages, printed by Williams, without the au- 

^ Publications of the Narraganset Club, i. 41. 

2 Ihid.,\. 50, 51. 

3 Ibid., i. 10. 



228 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

thor's name, in February, 1644. It is entitled " Queries 
of Highest Consideration, propounded to the five Holland 
Ministers, and the Scotch Commissioners," of whom he 
says, " that they appear in the front and present their 
Moulds and Patterns of Church Government from Hol- 
land, from Scotland, to our inquiring England." These 
were the five leading Independents, as well as, the Presby- 
terians from Scotland, who had published " Apologies for 
themselves and their Churches." The queries are twelve, 
and pertain to the spirituality and liberty of the church 
of Christ ; to a national covenant and a national Church, 
and its dangerous consequences ; to the promotion and 
reformation of religion by the use of the sword ; to the 
evidences of a true church ; and finally to its right to 
persecute " differing consciences." 

This little tract is in his usual style, repeating thoughts 
elsewhere expressed. It certainly puts some suggestive 
questions to the leaders of both religious parties in a very 
fearless way. It is closely related to the other subject 
which was in controversy between Williams and Cotton, 
and which called out the two most elaborate works of the 
Providence refugee. The controversy about church-fel- 
lowship — including the incidental one of the causes of 
his banishment — was indirectly and yet really related to 
another, of nearly as ancient date, in regard to liberty of 
conscience. This second debate linked itself with various 
discussions of the same question in the mother country. 
However singular and advanced in his views Williams 
may have been among the Puritans of Massachusetts, he 
was a follower and perhaps a pupil of men who preceded 
him, especially among the Baptists, in England. As early 
as 1611 they issued a Confession, which sa3'^s " that the 
Magistrate is not to meddle with religion or matters of 
conscience, nor to compel men to this or that form of reli- 
gion : because Christ is the King and Lawgiver of the 
Church and Conscience." ^ In 1614 appeared a tract en- 
^ Crosby, History of English Baptists, i., Appendix 7, etc. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 229 

titled " Religious Peace : or a Plea for Liberty of Con- 
science, by Leonard Burton, Citizen of London." It was 
followed the next year by " Persecution for Religion 
Judg'd and Condemn'd," etc. In 1620 a work was pub- 
lished in London with the following title : " A most hum- 
ble supplication of the King's Majesty's Loyal Subjects, 
ready to testify all civil obedience, by the Path of Alle- 
giance, or otherwise, and that of Conscience ; who are 
persecuted (only for differing in Religion) contrary to 
Divine and Human Testimonies : As foUoweth." It is 
signed by "your Majesty's loyal subjects unjustly called 
Anabaptists." According to Williams, " the Authour of 
these Arguments being committed by some then in power, 
close prisoner to Newgate, for the witnesse of some truths 
of Jesus, and having not the use of Pen and Inke, wrote 
these Arguments in Milke, in sheets of Paper, brought to 
him by the woman his keeper, from a friend in London, 
as the Stopples of his Milk bottles." ^ About the year 
1635 ^ four chapters of this work were sent to Cotton, as 
he alleged, by Williams, but, as Williams himself declared, 
by a certain " Master Hall of Roxbury," with a request 
for his " judgment of it." This he gave in a letter,^ whose 
arguments Williams controverted in " The Bloody Tenet 
of Persecution," a book of two hundred and forty-seven 
pages, printed, without the author's or publisher's name, 
in 1644. 

Williams found double occasion for this work. He 
drew his call to this discussion not only from his adver- 
sary's answer to the prisoner's arguments, but from a 
treatise which he supposed he had good reason for ascrib- 
ing, in part at least, to Cotton. This was " The Model 
of Church and Civil Power," a tract which, so far as we 
know, was never printed, except by extracts in " The 

1 Bloody Tenet ; P. N. C, iii. 61. 

2 " About a dozen years agoe " [1647], Bloody Tenet Washed, p. 1. 

3 PubHshed in London, 1649. 



230 • HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

Bloody Tenet." He devoted the last fifty-six chapters of 
his book to its examination. It deserves attention as one 
of the earliest formal attempts made in New England to 
define and balance the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdic- 
tions, as well as an illustration of the church-polity of that 
early period. If, as the editor infers, it is an attempt to 
meet the call made by the General Court, in 1634, for 
" one uniforme order of discipline in the churches," and 
also to consider " tiowe farr the Magistrates are hound to 
interpose for the preservation of that uniformity ^^'^ it was 
just the provocation Williams needed to expound his own 
advanced and liberal views of the entire divorce of civil 
and ecclesiastical power. Cotton himself refers to it as 
complementing what he had written against the error of 
toleration, by " adding reasons to justifie the Truth." 

In this controversy Cotton held to toleration for " con- 
sciences rightly informed." Williams took the broad 
ground of no civil protection for truth, and for perfect 
freedom even for such as are in error. Cotton is willing 
to grant liberty of conscience to those who will not " per- 
sist in Heresie or turbulent Schisms, when they are con- 
vinced in conscience of the sinfulnesse thereof." But 
such an one is not to be tolerated " after once or twice 
admonition," " either in the Church without Excommuni- 
cation, or in the Common-wealth without such punishment 
as may prevent others from dangerous and damnable in- 
fection." 1 W^illiams denounced all employment of the 
power of the magistrate, in the suppression of error or 
the enforcement of truth, as a crime against the soul and 
against Christ. " It is the will and command of God that 
a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or 
Antichristian consciences and worships, bee granted to all 
men in all Nations and Countries." 

This work is cast into a dialogue between Truth and 
Peace. It was written under great disadvantages, while 
1 Bloody Tenet, 14 ; P. N. C, ii. 53. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 231 

he was in England, " in change of rooms and corners, 
yea, sometimes in variety of strange houses, sometimes in 
the fields, in the midst of travel : where he hath been 
forced to gather and scatter his loose thoughts and papers." 
The reader is impressed by the free play of imagination, 
the ardent love of freedom, and indignation against perse- 
cutors, the fine touches of fancy, and sometimes fine turns 
of style. He is not so practiced a writer as Cotton ; but 
both write after the manner of theological discussion in 
their time. Both indulge in personal dispute, which is not 
altogether seemly. With whatever faults of temper or 
style, Williams has grasped a great principle, which he 
firmly believes, and for which he is ready to contend to 
the last. The book was burned. And yet it was of ser- 
vice. Eight years after he writes : — 

Some persons of no contemptible note nor intelligence, have 
hy letters from England, informed the discusser, that these 
Images of clouts it hath pleased God to make use of to stop no 
small leakes of persecution, that lately began to flow in upon 
dissenting consciences.-^ 

Cotton followed up the controversy by the replication 
published in London in 1647, entitled " The Bloody Tenet 
Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb, 
being discussed and discharged of Bloodguiltiness by just 
Defence." To this Williams rejoins, in 1652, by the pub- 
lication of a book of three hundred and twenty pages, 
besides the three prefaces, which were probably written in 
England, and perhaps while the work w^as going through 
the press. " This Rejoynder was sent to England long- 
since, and hoped to have been published," probably before 
the arrest and trial of Obadiah Holmes, in July, 1651. 
The author himself sailed for England in November, 
1651 ; and in the following spring he had it in press, hav- 
ing prepared it, unlike his other work, at home. He en- 
titled it " The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody : by Mr. 
Cottons endeavour to wash it white in the Blood of the 
^Bloody Tenet yet More Bloody, 38 ; P. N. C, iv. 104. 



232 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

Lamb," etc. He added to it a letter, which he had writ- 
ten to Governor Endicott, as the editor infers, during the 
previous summer, in reference to the case of John Clarke 
and Obadiah Holmes. Clarke had gone to England with 
him, in part to make known their case, which he did in 
his " 111 Newes from England : or a Narrative of New 
Engiands Persecution," which was issued the 13th of May, 
1652. As the body of his work was prepared, Williams 
can only make use of this striking case by reference to it 
in the margin. The work is in the same form of dialogue, 
in similar style, going over very much the same ground 
as the previous one, examining Cotton's work, chapter by 
chapter. One wonders if Cotton ever saw it, as scarcely 
half a year can have elapsed between its publication and 
his death. 

Williams took with him to England ^ two smaller works, 
which he put at once to press, both of them, according to 
the title-page, "printed in the second moneth, 1652." 
The first was a small quarto of thirty-six pages, called 
" The Hireling Ministry none of Christs ; or A Discourse 
touching the Propagating of the Gospel of Christ Jesus." 
It properly goes with the works on religious liberty, as 
putting into compact form some of the principal ideas 
which they contain. It has little or no reference to New 
England, and is obviously designed for influence in the 
mother country. Far off on the Narraganset, and cross- 
ing the wintry Atlantic, his soul, absorbed in the great 
idea of spiritual freedom, courts both sides of the sea 
alike, and longs for a pure and free religion here and 
there. Amidst the debates of the time, he comes forward 
with a doctrine altogether nearer to the true interests of 
Christianity than any then before the English mind, 
and, after his own favorite conception of the ministry, 
" prophesies." 

1 " For the substance and most of this, I suddenly drew it up. But 
being importuned for more copies than I was able to transcribe and 
hring^ therefore," etc. — Hireling Ministry, p. 2. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 233 

The book is really a treatise on the disestablishment of 
relif>ion, pleading that Christianity may stand or fall by 
nothing but the voluntary support it can win. It pleads 
for perfect liberty of conscience, and voluntaryism in 
church and ministry. It is a discussion of the defects of 
the ministry, in which are mingled interpretations of the 
prophetic Scriptures, on which some of his views in re- 
gard to the ministry and the propagation of the Gospel 
are based. Williams believed in a ministry of witnesses, 
or prophets, during what he calls the reign of Antichrist ; 
that " the begetting ministry of the apostles or messengers 
to the churches, or the feeding and nourishing ministry of 
pastors and teachers, according to the first institution of 
the Lord Jesus, are not yet restored and extant." His 
mind seems to have reacted against the whole system of 
organized Christianity, as insufficient for the world's con- 
version ; and therefore he said that for going out to the 
world as unconverted : — 

Untill the downefall of the Papacy, Revel. 18, and so the 
mounting of the Lord Jesus, and his white Troopers againe, 
Revel. 19, &c. ; For the going out of any to preach upon hire, 
for the going out to convert sinners, and yet to hold communion 
with them as saints in prayer : For the going out without such 
a powerfull Call from Christ, as the twelve and the seventy 
had ; or without such suitable gifts as the first Ministery was 
furnished with, and this especially without a due Knowledge of 
the Period of the Prophecies to be fulfilled; I have no faith to 
act not in the Actings and Ministerings of others. (Pp. 21. 22.) 

He held an opinion, which Cotton and the other New 
England divines seem to have adopted, founded on their 
interpretation of Revelation xv., " that untill the vyals be 
poured forth upon Antichrist, the smoak so filleth the 
Temple, that no man, that is (Jew of the Jewes or Gen- 
tiles) shall by conversion enter in."^ (Page 12.) 

1 Cf . Winthrop, ii. 36 ; Lechford's Plain Dealing, 21 ; Bloody Tenet 
yet mmre Bloody ; P. N. C, iv. 371. 



234 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

He believed, however, that " the free permitting of the 
consciences and meetings of the conscionable and faithful 
people throughout the Nation, and the free permission of 
the Nation to frequent such assemblies, will be one of the 
principal Meanes and Expedients (as the present state of 
Christianity stands) for the propagating of the Gospel of 
the Son of God." (Page 1.) That he held o& from the 
church in no factious and fanatical spirit appears from the 
advice he gives in a work published at the same time, that 
" if it be possible (with true satisfaction to our consciences 
and doubts in God's presence) let us never rest from 
being planted in to the holy society of God's children, 
gathered into the order of Christ Jesus, according to his 
most holy will and Testament." ^ 

In the same month of April appeared the work just 
spoken of, called " Experiments of Spiritual Life and 
Health, and their Preservatives." This is a small tract, but 
little longer than " The Hireling Ministry." In the lapse 
of more than two centuries it has quite disappeared. No 
copy of it was known to his two American biographers, or 
to American collectors ; and Dr. Elton, in England, stated 
that after diligent inquiry he was not aware that more 
than one copy was in existence. In 1862 it was dis- 
covered, bound with other matter in a volume belonging 
to the Philadelphia Library, and, although not yet re- 
printed by the Narraganset Club, pains were taken by one 
of Williams's descendants for its preservation by a private 
reprint. It is not controversial, but, as its title indicates, 
experimental, — *' a breath of a still and gentle voice" he 
calls it. 

The most of it was penn'd and writ (so as seldom or never 
such discourses were) in the thickest of the naked Indians of 
America, in their very wild houses, and by their barbarous fires. 

It was sent to his wife, probably in the winter of 1650,^ 

1 Experiments of Spiritual Life, p. 46. 

2 " When the Lord was pleased this last year (more than ordinarily) 
to dispose of my abode and travels among them." — Preface, iv. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 235 

'' upon her recovery from a dangerous sicknesse," " an 
handfull of flowers made up in a little Posey (though in 
Winter) for thy dear selfe and our dear children to look 
and smell on, when I as the grasse of the field shall be 
gone and withered." " Being greatly obliged to Sir 
Henry Vane, junior and his lady, I was persuaded to pub- 
lish it in her name." ^ It treats of ten signs or " trialles" 
of the spiritual life, even in cases when it is weak and 
sickly. These being discovered, there follow thirty " argu- 
ments " or signs of spiritual health and cheerfulness, and 
then six restoratives or preservatives of it. It is a treatise 
on practical religion, after the manner of Baxter and 
many of the Puritan divines, in which the author, taking 
vacation from his usual disputes, and dropping his con- 
troversial tone and weapons, enters into his own soul for 
the study of its spiritual experiences, and to learn the 
laws of spiritual health. Having fought hard in the 
battle of great princij)les, he now turns aside to comfort 
a distressed spirit, and, as he says, to sow " a little hand 
full of spiritual seed." From Cawcawmsqussick, in the 
heart of the Narraganset country, where he had retired, it 
may be from the strife of tongues, he sends " a breath of 
a still and gentle voice," as he calls it, to edify rather than 
to destroy. It is very searching in its diagnosis of reli- 
gious character, and, notwithstanding its quaint and anti- 
quated style, would still be useful as a treatise in practical 
divinity. It is, perhaps, the best specimen of the natural 
play of Williams's genius as a writer. And in it he com- 
pares well, not perhaps with Milton and Jeremy Taylor, 
but with the common religious writers of his time. Wil- 
liams appeared in print for the last time when he was an 
old man, after a silence of a score of years. Cotton died, 
and the old controversy terminated, giving W^illiams the 
last word, as time gave at last the victory to his side of 
the question. His readiness for debate, however, did not 
1 Letter to Mrs. Sadleir ; Elton, Life, 89. 



236 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

decline with years. In 1670 he wrote to Major Mason, 
in reference to this very controversy of liberty of con- 
science : " I do now offer to dispute these points and other 
points of difference, if you please, at Hartford, Boston, 
and Plymouth. For the manner of the dispute and the 
discussion, if you think fit, one whole day each month in 
summer, at each place, by course, I am ready, if the Lord 
permit, and, as I humbly hope, assist me." ^ Two years 
later, in the summer of 1672, George Fox, the great light 
of the Quakers, appeared in Rhode Island, and furnished 
Williams an opportunity, which no doubt he coveted, to 
challenge him and his sect to a public dispute. He could 
not raise an issue with them on the old question of toler- 
ation. Indeed, he was rather tempted to the discussion 
that he might show that he could tolerate the Quakers, 
while he hated their principles. " I had in mine eye," he 
says, '' the vindicating this colony for receiving such per- 
sons whome others would not, that I might give a publick 
testimony against their opinions." (Page 26.) Accord- 
ingly he offered to maintain fourteen propositions adverse 
to the Quakers and their doctrines, seven at Newport and 
seven at Providence, at such time as Fox and his friends 
might select. The debate began at Newport, August 9th, 
having been delayed till Fox had left town for England, 
and he says, " God graciously assisted me in rowing all 
day with my old boones so that I got to Newport toward 
the Midnight before the morning appointed." (Page 24.) 
The discussion between Williams and three of Fox's ad- 
herents, " his journeymen and chaplains," Williams called 
them, lasted three days, and the next week was renewed 
for one day at Providence. His account of this debate is 
given in a book of three hundred and twenty-seven pages, 
called " George Fox Diofj-d out of his Burrowes." It was 
printed in Boston, by John Foster, in 1676. As if row- 
ing himself to Newport from Providence in a day, when 
1 Knowles, Memoir^ 400. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 237 

over seventy years old, were not enough, he wrote to 
Samuel Hubbard at Newport : — 

As for thoughts for England, I humbly hope the Lord hath 
heaved me to write a large narrative of all those four days 
agitation between the quakers and myself : if it please God I 
cannot get it printed in New England, I have great thoughts 
and purposes for old. Mine age, lameness and many other 
weaknesses, and the dreadful hand of God at sea calls for deep 
consideration. What God may please to bring forth in the 
spring his holy wisdom knows. If he please to bring to an ab- 
solute purpose I will send you word.-^ 

The book is a thorn-hedge, bristling with sharp thrusts 
and bitter invectives. Two of his opponents he seems to 
have held in some respect. 

I had heard that John Stubs was learned in the Hebrew and 
the Greek (and I found him so). As for John Burnet I found 
him to be a moderate spirit and a very able speaker. The 
third, W. Edmundson, was newly come (as was said) from Vir- 
ginia, was very ignorant in the Scripture or any other learning, 
a stout, portly man of a great voice, and fit to make a Braga- 
docia (as he did), and a constant exercise meerly of my patience. 

Through two hundred and eight pages he gives the 
course of the debate on his fourteen propositions, and in 
an Appendix of one hundred and nineteen pages additional 
proof of his thirteen propositions, viz., " That the Quakers 
writings are Poor, Lame and Naked." 

It is quite impossible to give any account of the argu- 
ment. It is a tedious dispute, often over dark questions, 
which the inner light of the Quakers made no clearer 
through their clumsy and obscure phraseology. It may 
gratify curiosity to see how he would meet the personal 
retort which the Quakers would be sure to make when he 
charged them, as he did, with denying the visible church 
of Christ and its ordinances : — 

Some of them (especially John Stubs) demanded of me why 
1 Backus, i. 510. 



238 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

I thus charged them, and was myself so guilty, not living in 
Church Ordinances myself. I answered, that it was one thing 
to be in arms against the King of Kings and his visible Kingdom 
and administration of it, and to turn off all to notions and 
fancies of an invisible kingdom, and invisible Officers and Wor- 
ships as the Quakers did : Another thing among so many pre- 
tenders to be the true Christian Army and Officers of Christ 
Jesus to be in doubt unto which to associate and to list ourselves. 
After all my search and examinations and considerations, I 
said, I do profess to believe, that some come nearer to the first 
primitive Churches, and the Institution and Appointments of 
Christ Jesus than others, as in many respects so in that gallant 
and heavenly and fundamental principle of the true matter of a 
Christian Congregation, Flock or Society, viz : Actual Believers, 
True Disciples and Converts, Living Stones, such as can give some 
account how the Grace of God hath appeared unto them, and 
wrought that Heavenly Change in them : I professed that if my 
soul could find rest in joining unto any of the Churches profess- 
ing Christ Jesus now extant, I would readily and gladly do it, 
yea unto themselves whom I now opposed. (Pp. 65, 66.) 

This corresponds v^^ith what he wrote more than a score 
of years before, and illustrates his eccentric position and 
view in regard to the church. Under date of December 9, 
1649, we find him writing to the younger Winthrop : ^ — 

At Secunck a great many have lately concurd with Mr. Jo : 
Clarke and our Providence men about the point of a new Bap- 
tisme, and the manner by dipping : and Mr. Jo : Clarke hath 
bene there lately (and Mr. Lucar) and hath dipped them. I 
believe their practice comes neerer the first practice of our great 
Founder Christ then other practices of religion doe, and yet I 
have not satisfaction neither in the authoritie by which it is 
done, nor in the manner : nor in the prophecies concerning the 
rising of Christ's Kingdome after the desolations by Rome, etc. 

The fact is, Williams was a High-churchman. He be- 
lieved in apostolic succession. But the line was broken. 
" The apostolical commission and ministry is long since 
^ Massachusetts Historical Collection, vi. 274. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 239 

interrupted and discontinued." ^ The authority to organ- 
ize the visible church and administer the sacraments was 
extinct, or at least was lost, waiting for restoration. The 
sun had gone into eclipse. In the mean time there is no 
regular and authorized ministry. " I commend the pious 
endeavors of any (professing Ministery or not) to doe 
good to the soules of all men as We have opportunitie. 
But that au}^ of the ministers spoken of are furnished 
with true Apostolicall Communion (Matthew xxviii.) I 
see not." ^ But with all this he was a Baptist, holding to 
the spiritual nature of the church, and the perpetuation 
of its worship and sacraments, " according to the Institu- 
tion and Appointment of the last will and Testament of 
Christ Jesus." 

If this book was bitterly contemptuous. Fox and Bun- 
yeat surpassed it in their reply, '' A New England Fire- 
brand Quenched." Williams had a rare talent in this 
line. But the Quakers in general, and the writers of this 
book in particular, showed that he had met more than 
his match. 

These are the printed works of Williams, as far as 
known. Less than a year before his death, May 6, 1682, 
he wrote to Governor Bradstreet, of Massachusetts : — 

By my fireside I have recollected the discourses which (by 
many tedious journeys) I have had with the scattered English 
at Narraganset, before the war and since. I have reduced them 
unto these twenty-two heads (enclosed), which is near thirty 
sheets of my writings. I would send them to the Narragan set's 
and others : there is no controversy in them, only an endeavor 
of a particular match of each poor sinner to his Maker. (For 
printing I am forced to write to my friends, etc., that he that 
hath a shilling and a heart to countenance and promote such a 
soul-work, may trust the great Paymaster (who is beforehand 
with us already) for an hundredth for one in this life.^ 

^ Hireling Ministry , 4. 

2 Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, 219 ; P. N. C, iv. 371. 

^ Massachusetts Historical Collection, viii. 196. 



240 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 

He asks for aid in printing them. But no trace of them 
has ever been found. One would like to see a volume of 
sermons by such a veteran. That they would be pointed, 
we may well believe. That they would aim at " a par- 
ticular match of each poor sinner to his Maker," we might 
infer, when we recollect his description of his last inter- 
view with the dying " Pequot Capttaine Wequash." He 
says : " Amongst other discourse concerning his Sicknesse 
and Death, I dosed with him concerning his soule." ^ 
That was the style of his mind. He loved the close hug 
and wrestle which called out his own power, and gave him 
victory. 

Many of the letters of Williams are preserved, and it 
is proposed to include a collection of them, properly 
edited, in the Publications of the Narraganset Club. 
Many of them are already published in the Rhode Island 
Colonial Records and in Knowles's " Memoir." In 1863 
the Massachusetts Historical Society printed the " Win- 
throp Papers," containing, among others, sixty-seven let- 
ters from Williams to the two Winthrops, senior and 
junior, covering a period from 1632 to 1675. In a review 
of this volume, Mr. J. R. Lowell remarks : " Let us pre- 
mise that there are two men for whom our respect is 
heightened by these letters, — the elder John Winthrop 
and Roger Williams." ^ The respect for Williams will 
grow as he is known, and as his letters make him known. 
From the time when Cotton Mather lampooned him, as 
carrying a windmill in his head, to our own day, when 
elohn Quincy Adams, before the Massachusetts Historical 
Society, characterized him as " conscientiously conten- 
tious," he has been set aside as one of the otherwise- 
minded peo^ple, very unsuitable to sort with such respect- 
able Puritans as settled Massachusetts Bay. But though 
not a great man after some standards, perhaps not always 

1 Key ; P.N.C.i.m. 

2 North American Review^ October, 1867, p 594. 



ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. 241 

wise, as so radical reformers are not apt to be, he combined 
in singular union an eager spirit and a tenacious grasp of 
advanced truth, with great kindness, tolerance, and char- 
ity. His mind was active, penetrating, strong. His 
writings have many fine touches of fancy, and even flights 
of imagination. And yet his judgment is sober, and his 
mind is never carried off its feet by any imagination. 
He was thought, after the Scotch figure, to have " a bee 
in his bonnet." But time has shown that it was only an 
idea which found quicker and larger hospitality with him 
than with his associates. And it never crazed or befooled 
him. He was able to hold it in patient faith, and at last 
the world has overtaken him, and will do justice not only 
to his opinions, but to his character and his genius. 

The works of Williams, judged by their literary quality 
or their present influence, may have no striking impor- 
tance. Their circulation was narrow. One of them, at 
least, was burnt. They have not been preserved by any 
intrinsic vitality of eminent genius. But they take inter- 
est from his personality and life. He is greater than 
they, and they are to be read, to be preserved at any rate, 
for the light they shed on him, his work, and his time. 
They are a part of the history of human opinion, and of 
the conflict ideal truth has had to wage in the world. It 
is the fortune of the soldiers of truth. The victory is 
won ; the weapons are left behind on the field, forgotten. 
The controversy is antiquated, for we have reached a point 
where the doctrine of liberty is accepted without question, 
and where it seems as if it had never been in question ; 
unless, indeed, the attempts to enforce a semi-religous 
education in schools sustained by all sects, and to force 
into the Constitution of the United States a profession of 
religious belief, and to call on the State to support sectarian 
charities, are indications that one need to revert to the old 
hero of the " Bloody Tenet," and learn of him what be the 
first principles of spiritual liberty. 

16 



THE NEWTON LECTURES, 



NEWTON LECTURES. 



I. THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 

AVe are to consider The Relations of Theology and 
Education for the present hour, and in doing it, it will be 
necessary at the first step to lay out the Idea of Educa- 
tion. For as a science and an art it has a principle at 
the centre which wiU enable us to understand it better, 
and by which it connects itself with Theology, and the 
truth with which Theology deals. Religion, Government, 
History, Science, Reform, Preaching, Architecture, every- 
thing in life, has its idea ; not simply the notion which 
this or that person has of it, but, back of that, the form, 
the pattern, the type, the essential spirit and law of it, 
which makes it what it is, and nothing else. So it is with 
Education. It proceeds from a fundamental conception 
of man similar to that held by Theology, which perhaps 
is carried out further by Theology into remoter conse- 
quences, and larger ranges of thought and life, but to 
which all philosophical schemes of education must con- 
form. 

For what is the human beino- in the beo'innino; but a 
bundle of potential capacities ? He is an unformed, un- 
developed power, capable of indefinite growth, and whose 
growth is to be regulated, to be limited, not simply by his 
capacity, but by his opportunity, his environment, his 
facilities and helps and teachers, — in a word, by his edu- 
cation. It is a capacity to be and to know, and growth is 
its law. Every human being has the power to know more 



246 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

than he does, to become more than he is. And his in- 
crease of knowledge and power depends upon his train- 
ing. He begins with nothing, unless it be an hereditary 
stock of capacities and tendencies. He begins a germ, an 
egg, a little and helpless creature, who is to get possession 
of himself, of his faculties, of a place larger or smaller 
in the world, of his life such as it is to be, as he goes on 
from knowledge to knowledge, from one degree of devel- 
opment to another. It is this potency, the possibility in 
him of enlargement, even of immortal growth and life, 
which makes him worth anything, worth as much as The- 
ology shows him to be, and fit for the divine redemption 
of which it treats. 

Now his growth may be purely natural. His acquisi- 
tions may be made, his faculties may be unfolded, he may 
go on from infancy to maturity, with such education as 
he gets from his surroundings. Nature may educate his 
senses, making sight and hearing and touch keener, as 
they are exercised upon the world with which he contends 
for his existence. His wits are sharpened by contact with 
other people, with affairs, with the demands of life. His 
affections, his will, his power to adapt means to. ends, 
meditation, thought, language, get such exercise as his 
occasions, his dispositions furnish. Without books, with- 
out teachers, with nothing but the world he lives in, with 
his spontaneous impulses, or under such compulsion as 
life brings, he acquires an education, such as it is. And 
after books and teachers and schools come, there is still 
this great element in the education of the human being, 
which is unconscious, involuntary, which Nature and Life 
supply. All things become our tutors. Day and night 
instruct us. Winter's cold and summer's heat put their 
compulsion on us. We are toughened by labor ; we are 
softened by sorrow. We learn by experience, as difficulty 
comes to try our courage and patience, as trouble comes 
to try our faith, as we are perplexed by the awful mystery 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 247 

of death. We are educated, both in what we learn and 
in what we become, by whatever is, and by whatever hap- 
pens, by what we do and what we receive, by the efforts 
we make and the influences which pass upon us. The 
complete education of a human being for this world, and 
for a life beyond life, includes a great sum of things, 
physical, mental, moral, human, divine, in his condition, 
in himself. In any large and sufficient sense, education 
reaches all the possibilities of a human being, and makes 
out of ignorant, helpless, blank infancy the best manhood 
that under the circumstances can be made. It may even 
be made to compass all such a being is to be, and all that 
can make him the best he can be, and so would include 
morals, religion, and even redemption itself. Education 
is the making of a man, drawing out all power in him, 
developing him from a feeble beginning into his full 
possibility. Such an idea must lie at the foundation of 
all education, however limited its range. The first and 
the last thing to be done with a man is to make him a 
man, to train him in all the essentials of manhood, to un- 
fold him in his completeness, and fit him for his place, his 
duty in the world. And Milton approached the idea, and 
gave as comprehensive a definition of it as is often given, 
when he said, " I call a complete and generous education 
that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and 
magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of 
peace and war." 

But in its modern sense it narrows itself into the edu- 
cation of the school, the training mainly of the intellect ; 
the training which goes with knowledge, and comes from 
books and teachers. It is primarily education by instruc- 
tion. It is the development of intelligence, of that first, 
and at the lead. Lord Bacon introduced a new era by 
proclaiming the power of knowledge, and a new method 
of attaining it. But the progress made in educational 
methods has been not only in providing for the increase 



248 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

of knowledge, but that with it there shall be an increase 
of discipline. Knowledge is not to be put into the mind 
as corn into a sack, or as silver dollars are piled in the 
treasury. The mind is not only to receive, but to act, and 
to acquire the power of acting independently, vigorously, 
and for a result. It is not only to know, but to make use 
of knowledge ; to acquire such knowledge as not only is 
useful and necessary, but as quickens, and strengthens, and 
disciplines the faculties, so that the mind can originate as 
well as receive, and lead rather than follow. Man is not 
all memory, that he should sit down and let the stream of 
knowledge run in. Reason, understanding, imagination, 
will, the manifold capacities for turning knowledge to use, 
for turning truth into power, for thinking as well as for 
learning, for doing as well as for knowing how to do, are 
embraced in a true and sufficient education. So that, if 
education were limited to intellectual training, as it can- 
not be, it is not a superficial loading of the mind with 
information ; it is the evolution of its primal forces, the 
development of its deep, real, substantial powers. It is 
the calling out, the leading out, the full unfolding of the 
intellect, as the source of thought as well as the recep- 
tacle of knowledge, as the master of life. And so, as a 
discipline of power, it has a place for Theology, as we shall 
see by and by. This cannot be too much insisted upon in 
Pedagogics, that knowledge is secondary, or rather that it 
is to be acquired for discipline as well as for knowledge ; 
that the student learns, not for the sake of being learned, 
but in order that, knowing more, he may have better and 
larger control of his powers, and be capable of using 
them to acquire more readily, and perform more efficiently. 
The distinction between acquisitive and disciplinary studies 
is never to be lost out of sight. That education is for the 
sake not only of what a person may know, but of what he 
may be and become, is not to be forgotten. 

But Education is not for the individual only ; it is a 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 249 

social as well as a personal interest. It is a great social 
benefit, because it makes so much more of the persons who 
compose society. And the education of individuals is not 
for their sake only, but for the good of the whole. And 
this is very much more so as society advances, as a demo- 
cratic spirit grows, as Christianity magnifies the impor- 
tance of the individual, and creates a sure hope of the 
coming of the kingdom of God among men. Then it be- 
gins to be seen that the good of one is the good of all ; 
that the more persons are educated the more society gains 
the advantage ; in fact, that society receives all the good 
which accrues to the individual. In ancient society the 
State was all, and the individual of minor consequence. 
But Christianity, lengthening the life of the individual 
into an immortal future, making him the object of divine 
compassion and of a special redemption, and bringing 
him into fellowship with the Infinite Father, makes him 
personally of greater consequence, and that not for loss 
but for gain to the commonwealth. The fuller, stronger, 
better man he is, the more he contributes to the common 
life. The less ignorance the more security, and the greater 
advantage of all kinds. 

Society, organized society, has a life of its own, quite 
beyond that of its individual members, and lasting much 
longer. In it both evil and good ripen more slowly. In 
it evil and good get more widely diffused, more firmly in- 
corporated. And as every person participates in the com- 
mon life, as his character and destiny are influenced by 
his environment, the more education there is, the higher 
the general level of intelligence and character is lifted by 
it. The individual and society profit together. So edu- 
cation becomes the need, the interest, the work of society. 
The State undertakes it for its own protection, for its own 
preservation. How far it shall go, how many and much 
it shall educate, is a vexed question. If it is to go only 
to the extent of self-preservation, there is no hard-and-fast 



250 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

line to be drawn even there. And ricli, intelligent com- 
munities want to go further than that. Education is a 
part not only of the common defense, but of the j^ros- 
perity, the elevation, the honor of the State. Its intelli- 
gence is its glory beyond royal splendors, or great armies 
and navies, or even immense wealth. If it is a luxury, 
it is a luxury which great nations can afford. That the 
government may do too much, and the individual too 
little, is clear enough ; and it is a mischief. Governments 
have always been trying to do all they can, and leave as 
little as possible to other agencies. Too much depend- 
ence on the State, or on social organizations, discourages 
the very spirit of self-help which good education is de- 
signed to create. And yet, while all education is within 
a certain limit self -education, and in some cases quite ex- 
clusively so, the education of the j)eople must be under- 
taken by the community or the State, and be paid for out 
of the common fund. Society must educate, because it 
will not be done without. In free nations, society must 
educate, not only that freedom may continue, but because 
the free spirit seeks the common benefit, and seeks it 
through the general intelligence. Such is the tendency 
in monarchical Germany, in democratic America. The 
Church may undertake it, private charity may undertake 
it, but the people's education more and more comes to be 
by the people themselves. This is the American idea, be- 
ginning early in our history, and destined to go from na- 
tion to nation, as privilege declines and democracy ad- 
vances. This, at least, is the American faith, that educa- 
tion is a great public necessity, and must be had some- 
how, cost what it may. Whatever the nation has or has 
not, it must have schools, and they must be had at the 
public expense. The new generations must be educated 
to be made ready for their great heritage, and that the 
republic suffer no damage. 

There is one thins; more involved in the Idea of Educa- 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 251 

tlon, both individual and social. It is not ail of one 
grade. It is liigher and lower. It is primary and liberal. 
It may be carried on into higher and broader regions of 
knowledge and discipline ; the higher it goes the smaller 
the number who secure it. If there is a point w^iere it 
must stop as a tax on the community, by some means it 
must be carried beyond that, for the sake of the individ- 
ual, and for the sake of society. For liberal education 
also is a public necessity. In its way it is as essential and 
useful as the common. The lower depends on the higher 
to make it better, even to make it good. There cannot be 
education for the people unless there is an educated class 
from whom their teachers are drafted. And by teachers 
I do not mean schoolmasters, any more than by educa- 
tion I mean instruction in elementary studies. I do not 
mean simply that the system of public schools depends 
upon higher and academic education, and would be feeble 
and narrow and mechanical without it. Bej^ond that, not 
only are advanced education and higher institutions neces- 
sary to recruit all the liberal and learned professions ; 
they are not only necessary for the existence of an edu- 
cated or learned class in society, but they are like banks in 
business. They accumulate intellectual capital, and keep 
it for discount. They store up knowledge, and advance 
its frontiers. They make it available for all uses. Liter- 
ature, art, invention, all science, all religion, draw upon 
their funds, and find in them their students and promot- 
ers. There is no high interest of human life which is 
not dependent upon them. Their discipline is felt in the 
men who lead public opinion ; in whatever creates thought, 
and makes it ruler in society. All the best things flourish 
better for the atmosphere they create. They relieve civi- 
lization of the coarseness which comes from wealth with- 
out culture. They protect society against the mischiefs 
of superficial and half knowledge. They stand for learn- 
ing, for order, for progress, against raw haste and useless 



252 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

experiment, and the quackery which invades all profes- 
sions. They stand for firm foundations as against extem- 
porized and fanciful inventions of the hour. It is not the 
rainfall of the surface, but the water in the deep springs, 
which keeps good the supply against drought. It is even 
the treasured snow in the mountain heights which keeps 
the rivers full. It is study, knowledge, thought, disci- 
pline, in academic institutions ; it is the ampler scope and 
larger result of education in the college, the university, 
the professional school, which accomplishes for society 
what is impossible for the more diffused education of the 
common school. The college, the university, is not only 
the teacher of teachers, but the nurse of scholars, the 
home of good learning, the hearth where a thousand new 
torches are kindled, the source of perpetual recruit for 
law, letters, theology, statesmanship, science. It is not 
for all, not even for many. But it is for all so far as 
society is made better, richer, stronger by it. It may be 
supported by the State, and perhaps on the ground that, 
like common education, it is a public benefit. But in our 
history it has been very much the child, as well as the 
ally, of the Church. It has been the beneficiary of those 
who had faith in knowledge as necessary for religion and 
all virtue, and who wanted education to go higher than 
the community would, or could carry it. It has been an 
investment of private charity for the public good, — in the 
beginning for an educated ministry chiefly, and now and 
always for the larger benefit of having well-educated men 
in all departments of life. It is established to give a dis- 
tinctively academic culture, which is found nowhere else, 
and which like better blood always tells. It is founded 
and endowed, not simply to teach what is called useful 
knowledge, but to ground students in the principles which 
lie back of all knowledge and all life ; to cultivate the 
love of truth as well as ampler acquaintance with it ; to 
ingrain select minds with the spirit of the best human 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 253 

culture, and through them to promote all literature, all 
art, all knowledge, all virtue, all excellence, the intellec- 
tual and spiritual acquisitions which endure and have 
mightiest power over men. 

Education is here. Theology is here. Can they stand 
apart, uninfluenced by each other ? Is there anything in 
the nature of the two to bring them together ? Can they 
come together in any reciprocal service ? Have they gone 
together? And if they are to be separated, how far? 
How far may Theology be tributary to Education, the 
lower and the higher ? How far may Education be tribu- 
tary to Theology? These questions cover the ground 
which the previous discussion has prepared us to traverse. 

Theology is knowledge, and a large and valuable and 
indispensable part of human knowledge. It has been the 
study of generations of accomplished inquirers. It em- 
bodies the conclusions of Christian thought through all the 
Christian centuries. It is an organized body of truth, no 
less truth because it is spiritual. That it is knowledge 
mixed with faith, and resting upon it, makes it no less 
knowledge, and no less valuable. That it belongs to the 
mental, or even metaphysical, rather than the physical 
sciences, does not diminish its authority or its usefulness. 
Is there nothing but matter in the universe, or in man, 
that there should be no investigation and no knowledge 
beyond ? Theology is still a science. And it is a science 
of facts. As historical facts, they areas real and as veri- 
fiable as any other facts in history. As spiritual facts, 
they are as real as any in the world of Nature. As super- 
natural facts, they are as real as the existence of God, or 
the spiritual nature of man. There are the facts, and 
they have to be explained, as all facts have to be. And 
theology is their explanation, their reduction into rational 
relation, into clearness and order. It deals with them as 
any science does with the facts of the natural world. It 
is an absurd and pedantic way of speaking to limit science 



254 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

to physics. And it is just as narrow and intolerant to 
talk about ruling out Theology as an obsolete, sterile, at 
best visionary and speculative system, which advanced 
science cannot recognize, which has nothing to do with 
real knowledge, the things in this world men need to 
know. Theology is knowledge. And no department of 
human knowledge is broader or higher. It deals with 
great things, the greatest things, the greatest subjects of 
thought, the greatest facts in history, the greatest Being. 
It deals with religion as a fact of human nature and life ; 
with revelation as a fact in human histor}^ in God's rule 
of the w^orld ; with man in his disease and sin, in his re- 
demption and renewal, in his past and his future ; with 
the life invisible and immortal. It includes the study of 
the Scriptures, a literature in itself. It includes the study 
of the history of the Church, of the development of Chris- 
tian doctrine, of the application of it to man's spiritual 
life, of the influence of it in human civilization. It is 
a study in literature, in history, in philosophy. And so, 
added to the studies of a liberal education, it takes its 
place with them, and is of their kind. In its simplicities 
it touches the earliest education of every child. But in 
its profoundest researches and broadest conclusions it not 
only touches all other liberal studies, but covers a vast 
field of its own. It is a study for specialists. But every- 
body who reads the Bible knows something of it, and no 
liberally educated person can afford to remain in igno- 
rance of its facts and principles. It is a liberal education 
in itself. It requires a knowdedge of at least two ancient 
languages, one Semitic and one Aryan. It involves know- 
ledge of the fundamental principles of philosophy. It 
demands a training in logic, in literature, in ethics, and, 
for its application, in rhetoric. And the history of its 
development, ancient and modern, the works of its great 
writers, its connection with history, with morals, with 
literature, with civilization, its problems with which the 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 255 

thoughts of men still struggle, the discussion of them in 
French, Dutch, German, as well as English, all spread a 
great arena for cultivated minds. It is the enthusiastic 
study of one of the largest professions, and in the univer- 
sities, and in its own special schools, shows that it is no 
antiquarian, obsolete study, which some people, who think 
themselves far in the advance of the army of thought, 
seem to suppose. Its special schools have subtracted the 
small portion of it which the college curriculum used to 
include. It cannot be taught in the lower schools, sup- 
ported as they are by the community, no longer homo- 
geneous as it was in the beginning of New England, but 
divided into many sects. But wherever it finds its place, 
by whomsoever taught, by whomsoever studied. Theology 
finds its relation to Education, in its very nature, as a 
large, diversified, profound subject of human knowledge 
and thought, a comprehensive and liberal study. 

It is not only a knowledge, but a discipline. It is re- 
lated to the cardinal idea of Education as a development 
of the human being in his best and strongest capacities. 
It accepts the educational idea of man, and in its largest 
sense. Whatever ruin sin has wrought, the faculties of 
a human being remain, and man is capable of growth, 
of improvement, of increase of power. Theology makes 
him of unspeakable worth as an object of divine love, and 
as heir of everlasting life. He is worth education, for he 
is capable of it ; and though he is not redeemed by it, he 
is thereby made more of a man, and fulfills more com- 
pletely the idea of his Creator. His education falls into 
line with all the higher purposes of God concerning him 
which are unfolded in Theology. And on the other hand 
Theology supplies ideas which are great educational 
forces. For it is not knowledge, but the thing known, 
which has value and power. It is not faith, but the thing 
believed. Principles are greater than facts, and there are 
principles of vast reach and vital force in Theology, " the 



256 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

truths which wake to perish never," the spiritual verities 
which surpass all the teachings of natural science. It is 
a science of principles, of the eternal laws of the spiritual 
universe, of the kingdom of God in this world. It is not 
necessary to disparage any science, any literature, any 
knowledge. But the knowledge of God is greater than 
that of any creatures. The laws of matter are certainly 
no greater than the laws of mind. Vastness of space, the 
astronomic grandeurs of the universe, are not grander 
than the government of moral beings, the unfolding of 
God's invisible kingdom, and the spiritual destinies of 
mankind. The knowledge of Nature, which in the recent 
years has so prodigiously extended, is of inestimable ad- 
vantage. And Theology has gained a part of it. But 
the truth about pigeons and earthworms, about a planet- 
ary transit or the chemistry of the sun, when the least is 
said, is no more precious, no more practical, no more in- 
spiring, than the truth about the soul, about the life to 
come, about the life and doctrine and mission of Jesus 
Christ. There is no truth so searching, so uplifting, with 
such power over the spiritual nature, its hopes and fears 
and longings. In a word, there is no truth so disciplinary 
for the intellect, for the conscience, for the whole soul. It 
is a knowledge which gives discipline, the profound and 
vigorous discipline which is an education of the whole man. 
This it does in at least two ways. Theological truth 
performs at least two offices in the thorough discipline of 
mind and character. It is of such a nature that it exer- 
cises the mind with what is great and serious and solid, 
and this is what man needs. The mind taken up with 
trifles, with superficialities, with the fancies of literature, 
with the curiosities of science, with the mere facts of his- 
tory and not its solemn lessons, with what pleases rather 
than instructs, with knowledge that is only knowledge 
and takes no hold of conviction and the deep powers of 
life, misses an element of strengthening discipline which 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 257 

it greatly needs, and which Theology supplies. Hard 
study, study of exact science, of a strongly knit language 
like the Greek, study of subjects which require searching 
analysis and the exercise of discrimination and judgment, 
study which obliges the student to think, is a vigorous 
gymnastic for the mind. But Theology is more than a 
study for information. It bi'ings up the mind against 
truth, — truth with which the soul must struggle, truth 
which is profound rather than curious, not transient, but 
divine and everlasting. It is truth which often, in the 
crisis of a soul's experience, shakes it like an earthquake ; 
truth which enters into a man to make him a new creature, 
his mental as well as spiritual life quickened, and set on a 
new track by the shock. Conversion has been often the 
beginning of a new intellectual era. Faith coming with 
knowledge, theological truth becoming religious convic- 
tion, doctrine turning into spiritual reality, a course of 
education begins which takes hold of what is deepest, and 
calls out hidden power. There have been such periods in 
national life, — for instance, in the national life of Eng- 
land, — when great and vital questions of the time went 
down to the roots of religious doctrine and faith, and the 
minds of men have been sobered into earnestness, and 
invigorated for great action, and the formalists, and the 
pedants, and the play-actors, and the charlatans have been 
swept away like chaff in the wind. This is the education 
which makes a people virile and puissant ; not churning 
questions of political expediency ; not listening every 
morning for what the newspapers will say; not giving 
their whole mental force to arithmetic, and counting the 
great end of education to secure six per cent, interest ; not 
educating their youth into intelligence and accomplish- 
ment, without one serious conviction they would not sell, 
with everything gracious but a religious faith ; not afraid 
to put its foot on any iniquity, and assert the law of Christ 
in the face of king or mob ; /but which gives its Sundays 
17 



258 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

to God and not the Devil, to teaching religious truth 
rather than to j)lay; whose colleges and churches and 
clergy uphold and proclaim the doctrine which is accord- 
ing to godliness ; in a word, which has a theology, and 
believes it, and feels its truth like iron in its blood ; like 
the air of the mountains or the salt sea in its lungs, like 
the ring of health and power in its voice as it speaks for 
righteousness, for liberty, for honor, for truth against 
party, for justice against the clamors of the violent, or the 
monopolies of the powerful. 

There is another thing the mind needs quite as much, 
and that is repose, satisfaction, anchorage, something not 
only to lift it up and strengthen it, but something to hold 
on to, something to settle and compose it. For we live in 
a world of appearances, and life goes on amidst instabili- 
ties and uncertainties, the winds and tides going in many 
directions. The mind is puzzled by the shifting scene. 
And it does not get education on the wing, while flying 
from perch to perch. It becomes flighty, unbalanced, 
restless. Whatever subjects it deals with, it must come 
at last to reality, and stand on some solid ground. It 
must go back of appearances to the eternal truth of things, 
to find that. And so Theology, with the knowledge of 
the Eternal God, with the truth of a Divine Revelation, 
with a remedy for all moral disease, with an outlook into 
infinite regions, and with faith going where knowledge 
cannot reach, brings some sure foundation for belief, for 
mental repose, for spiritual certitude and satisfaction, 
amidst the fluctuations of opinion, and where secular know- 
ledge fails. The truth in it is of such a nature as to tax 
the mind which seriously takes hold of it, and rouse it to 
inquiry, and as well to subdue and steady it. There are 
some kinds of education which only inflate the mind with 
names instead of ideas, with a show of knowledge without 
depth, supplying it with a large stock of ready-made and 
cheap opinions, which turns out bankrupt when hard times 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 259 

come. What the mind needs, whether it knows much or 
little, is to be grounded in truth, and in the truth which is 
moral and unchanoeable. If it has laid hold of the ob- 

o 

jects and the doctrines of a religious faith, of those reali- 
ties which lie at the basis of all Theology, it has something 
under its feet to stand on, and by its side to take hold of. 
Whatever of knowledge slips away, these never fail. 

And now, if we ask what Education is for, and what is 
its ultimate issue, the theological answer alone seems suffi- 
cient. The child thinks it goes to school that it may learn 
to read and write. And what does it learn to read and 
write for ? Not simply for that, but for something fur- 
ther. And so we go on, education leading into further 
education, and this life leading into another. There is no 
sufficient end for all this great effort and expenditure in 
Education itself, even the highest. That is for an end 
beyond. And we learn what Education is for, only as we 
learn what life is for, why God made man, why he re- 
deems him. Life and all that is in it, and all that makes 
it greater and better and more beneficent, finds its end 
and issue in the plan of God, which Theology alone makes 
clear. Education takes on a very large meaning when 
from being some learning of letters and figures, even of 
sciences and philosophies, it becomes the unfolding and 
discipline of a human being in all his possibilities, till by 
faith as well as knowledge, and by the unsearchable and 
inexhaustible grace of God, he is changed into the image 
of the divine Christ, even from glory to glor3^ His educa- 
tion, beginning in little things here, such as in childhood 
he is capable of, has its terminus in the immortal com- 
pleteness prepared for him in Christ. 

Theology once had much more actual contact with 
Education than it has now. The historical fact is, that 
the two have in late times been drawing away from each 
other. The schools of Christendom were once very much 
under clerical and ecclesiastical control. Education was 



260 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

priestly, b}^ and for the regular and secular clergy. They 
were the learned class. In the Middle Age, the learning 
was not in science, which had not begun its career ; and 
not in literature, which was not yet unburied. Such uni- 
versities as Paris and Oxford were full of theological stu- 
dents. The acutest intellects turned to theology, and 
Erigena, and Aquinas, and Abelard, and Duns Scotusgave 
their masterly power to that alone. In fact, till the Re- 
naissance, till the Reformation ushered a new era, the 
Church was potent beyond any other influence in society. 
But an emancipating process has been steadily going on. 
Religion still lives. Theology still lives. Their power 
remains. Their influence penetrates life through other 
channels and in other ways. They have been obliged to 
retire from their former, and immediate, and undivided 
control, from causes presently to be mentioned. The col- 
leges, most of them, in this country, hold some more or 
less close connection with one or another Christian com- 
munion, and have a more or less religious if not theolog- 
ical character. The early colleges sprang out of the in- 
terest of their denominational supporters in the training 
of their ministry, and in gaining the power of academic 
education. The majority of them are still avowedly and 
in spirit Christian. But many States have established 
and endowed their own universities, and they can have no 
more religion than the State has. And common educa- 
tion is, from the necessity of the case, entirely divorced 
from religion. Religious instruction is left to other agen- 
cies. With no established Church, with all churches equal 
before the law, with a people of all kinds of religion and 
no religion, and all having equal rights, and all taxed for 
the support of schools, it is impracticable to have any but 
a limited and secular public education. If religious, theo- 
logical instruction is wanted, it must be given in other 
places and ways than the public school. The Presbyterian, 
and the Catholic, has his parish school, supports it himself. 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 261 

and can have liis own theology taught in it, because he, 
and not the community, pays for it. That the State does 
not teach theology is no evil ; it is a great good. It 
would be a great mischief if it did. The world has seen 
enouo'h of State relisfion. If the State educates, let it 
keep within its proper bounds, and leave religion to itself, 
to its believers and churches, to its own power to sustain 
and propagate itself. If we have a free religion, and pre- 
fer it, we have nothing to do but accept its logical conse- 
quences. We have the advantage ; religion can afford to 
suffer any disadvantage, for it gains in other ways. 

For this is one of the first causes of this emancipation 
— if the word may be allowed — of Education from the- 
ological control. The doctrine of religious liberty, even 
of toleration, is rather a recent product of Christianity. 
It took centuries for it to come to the idea. It depended 
so long on foreign help that it forgot its own power. It 
discovered at last that it could stand alone, and that it 
needed none but voluntary adherents. It discovered that 
men were not to be forced in their opinions and beliefs ; 
that Theodosius was little better than Galerius ; that per- 
secution for opinion's sake is no better in a Christian than 
in an infidel ; that men are not made Christians by law% 
but by their own faith. At all events, men discovered 
that they had equal rights, and that, whether a citizen was 
a believer or an unbeliever, he had equal standing wdth all 
the rest before the law ; that toleration is an insult and 
misnomer when the dissenter has the same right to his 
opinion that the churchman has to his ; that, if there is 
to be freedom anywhere, it must begin in religious belief, 
where a man is responsible to God, and not to society. 
As men have departed from an autocratic, infallible 
Church, as in consequence they have divided into sects, as 
they cannot agree in their theology, and as at last they 
have acquired the right to differ, such freedom has had 
its natural consequence. Theology retires into its own 



262 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

domain, and rejoices in the freedom won for it. For that 
it is free is one of its greatest victories, and ausj)icates 
better victories to come. 

And then since the Middle Age there has been an in- 
creasing accession of the secular spirit, or of secularizing 
influences. The crusades, the enlargement of the world 
by discovery and improved navigation, the political pro- 
gress, the industrial activity, the intellectual changes in- 
duced by the growth of science, the reduction of ecclesi- 
astical ascendency, the growth of democracy, have brought 
a new era, and theology has more competitors, mth less 
factitious authority. Christianity is still at work effec- 
tively in the life and thought of mankind. It is less in the 
monastery, and more in the busy world. It is not less in 
Theology, but is more in missions and reforms. And its 
Theology depends less upon authority and more upon 
truth. It has less to do with politics and government, 
and more with thought and individual life. It has less to 
do with Education, because there is so much more, and 
besides, to learn than there was seven or five or even 
three centuries ago. 

For, again, there is the tendency to division, specializa- 
tion, the distribution of study over a wide and various 
field. The educational curriculum gets reorganized as 
new studies crowd in. The natural sciences take up room 
once given to literature and philosophy and theology. 
And many students of physical science have taken up a 
special jealousy of Theology. An antipathy has been 
provoked between the two. The feud is very unfortunate. 
Physical science has a great field, and we cannot know 
too much of Nature. So long as it is confined to the 
study of Nature as a fact it does great service, and The- 
ology rejoices in the enlarging knowledge. But if it also 
undertakes to have a theology, and set it up as a substi- 
tute for the Christian ; if it relegates God into an abyss 
of uncertainty and nescience ; if it resolves spirit into a 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 263 

finer property of matter, and sets the human will in bonds 
of fate ; if it abrogates prayer, and Eternal Providence, 
and supernatural revelation, — then it overpasses its proper 
bounds, and Theology has its word to say in objection, 
and very justly. And yet in the end Theology will not 
suffer or retreat from its own field. The questions of 
which it treats are vital and perpetual. They reach far 
beyond the transmutations of matter and the realm of 
physical force. They reach to the Infinite Source of all be- 
ing, and to the deep secrets of the spiritual life. Banished, 
they always return. Physical science cannot answer them, 
wdiatever errors it clears away, whatever illumination it 
sends into the dark corners of the universe. At the end 
of the telescope, at the end of the microscope, far as they 
search, there is still matter, and not God, or the remedy 
for sin, or the secret of spiritual j^eace and everlasting- 
life. So long as men think and aspire, so long as the 
Spirit of God remains among them, so long as Christ 
Jesus draws them to their highest ideal and opens the 
kingdom of heaven to all believers, so long as the soul 
knocks at the door of the invisible world and hears voices 
out of it which science fails to interpret, so long as the 
Bible tells what nature never has told, and with all our 
solicitation never will tell, so long Theology will not ad- 
journ, and will find its place somewhere in the education 
of mankind. 

It remains to see what relation in its turn Education 
has to Theology, whether of help or hindrance. That 
Theology, or anything good and high, should flourish in 
an atmosphere of ignorance, is not to be expected. When 
it was in the hands of a hierarchy, and wrapped up in a 
vast and oppressive ecelesiasticism, there w^as great dark- 
ness, though in fact it was the source of whatever in- 
tellectual light, the quickener of w^iatever intellectual 
power, there was. But the truth it deals with came out 
from the Eternal Light, and never finds the darkness 



264: THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

congenial. It is not afraid of the light, wherever it 
comes from. It does not turn back to the " ages of faith," 
as they have been called, as if it needed credulity rather 
than the clear light of knowledge to grow in. The true 
Theology sets its face towards the sunrise, and welcomes 
the angels of intelligence as they come leading in the day. 
It may have new questions to answer, new" adjustments to 
make with the new knowledge. It may have to hold its 
ground against such scepticism, even such heady opposition, 
as new knowledge, or the conceit of it, brings. But in the 
long run it will gain nothing by keeping in the rear, and 
sulking over the progress of intelligence. It must keep 
up with it, and make use of it, and even direct it, if it 
can. Education is here, and it will stay, and do its w^ork. 
And part of its work is to help Theology. 

The affinity of Theology with higher education has al- 
ready been mentioned. It ranks with the liberal studies. 
And liberal education supplies it with a suitable instru- 
ment. It requires that, for its best achievement, whether 
in research or in application. There is an experimental 
theology which comes by the tuition of the Holy Spirit, 
from the study of the Scriptures, and the knowledge of 
Christ in sj)iritual experience. Such training and such 
acquisitions have been of great value sometimes. Such 
practical education apprehends the spiritual truth in The- 
ology, and uses it with great force in handling the souls 
of men. It has stood its ground when a more learned 
theology has slipped its anchors and gone adrift. But 
it lacks, of course, the power of accurate criticism, of 
searcliing analysis, of logical construction, and, when the 
pinch comes, of apologetic defense. It is not learned in 
the history of Theology, and contributes little to its devel- 
opment. It does not unfold the ample fullness of Christ, 
the length and breadth and depth and height of the Di- 
vine revelation. A disciplined and instructed intellect, as 
well as a pure heart and a simple faith, are necessary for 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 265 

the great work Theology has to do. This its masters have 
had. This it requires, if any science does. This it de- 
serves, if any truth does. It is belittled and enfeebled 
when it falls into untrained hands. And if the univer- 
sities and the colleges, and all liberal education, were 
surrendered to unbelief, or simply to secular knowledge, 
while Theology, relying on the virtues of faith and the 
superiority of its truths, or the enthusiasm rather than 
the knowledge of its students, should relinquish their alli- 
ance or help, it would soon fall into decline and impo- 
tence, and lose its place in the world's thought and life. 
What is the highest education for, if not to promote the 
knowledge and diffusion of the highest truth? Or, is 
Theology so simple, so self-evident, so divinely assisted, 
that it is sufficient for itself, and can take no help from 
educated mind ? If so, it is an exception to everything 
else of the same nature in the world. No, it is a kind of 
knowledge which, beyond the spiritual help of faith, re- 
quires the best powers, and the best training, that The- 
ology may be worthy of its contents and its office. A lib- 
eral education is not more fitly employed than in its study, 
its fuller development, its firmer establishment in the 
thought of the time. It will be a dark day when the 
spirit of academic culture is secularized and alienated 
from the profound truths which lie at the foundation of 
Theology. And it will be quite as unfortunate when, 
from any choice or any compulsion, Theology loses the 
best training and the richest learning the schools can give. 
It cannot afford for its own health and power and progress 
to let liberal education go into the service of all truth but 
that which binds men to the throne of God and the Cross 
of Christ. It has too sacred a cause to defend, too precious 
a treasure to guard, too much in the future at stake, to 
part with any advantage or any help it can take from the 
highest education. 

That Theology should have its own schools, and its 



266 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

special courses of study, and an education imbued with 
its own spirit and directed to its pro]3er ends, it seems like 
an impertinence to argue in this place, where it has been 
proved by the exj)erience of two thirds of a century. 
The theological school separated from the college is a 
recent institution. Its advantage is, that it specializes the 
study and concentrates its resources, while it distributes it 
into its different departments, and so economizes the forces 
of our Theology. It starts from the point where the college 
leaves Education, and carries on the advanced knowledge 
and discipline into a new and select and fertile field. It 
takes the resources supplied by liberal education, and so 
multiplies the power of Theology, both for investigation 
and for use. If it is founded and sustained for a practi- 
cal purpose, to train a ministry for the Church, it cannot 
fulfill this purpose well except by the scientific study of 
Christian truth. For a strong clergy needs to be in- 
structed in something more than the practical details of 
religion. It must be grounded in the principles of its 
science first, or it will be a weak clergy. Law, medicine, 
and theology are practical professions, but before that, they 
are sciences, whose fundamental principles must be known. 
Theology must be understood as a science before it can be 
taught ; and it covers too much ground for a novice to 
give his opinion about its questions off-hand. He must 
study. He must learn. He must go from facts to prin- 
ciples. And it requires thorough training to know them 
both, to know them all, to bring them into coherency and 
system, to know them so as to teach them, even in their 
practical application. And theological education, like lib- 
eral education, is not for practical use only. It has a 
body of teachers and students who are working over the- 
ological material, who are accumulating stores of know- 
ledge, who are shaping the theological thought and belief 
of their time. They create its funds, its capital, the 
power behind preaching and literature. Education does 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 267 

for Theology what it does for all knowledge and all stu- 
dents. It increases knowledge. It increases discipline. 
It makes theologians. It makes Theology intelligible, 
consistent, scientific. It makes the difference between 
crudeness and clearness, between undeveloped and devel- 
oped thought, between the ore and the metal, bullion and 
coin. It is a necessity of Theology ; a necessity of the 
Church and its ministry. It is a necessity of an age 
when education is common and diffused; when it leaves 
nothing out of its reach, not even Theology ; when nothing 
passes unquestioned ; when faith must give its reasons for 
faith, as much as knowledge for knowledge. Without 
it Theology is a pond, not a running stream. It keeps 
thought alive, and inquiry moving, and Theology improv- 
ing and influential. It enables Theology to profit by all 
new knowledge, to meet new exigencies, and time as it 
comes. Theology cannot do without Education, and an 
Education of its own. 

And then, finally, there is the influence of Education 
in general on the course of theological as well as other 
thought. For Education sets in motion all human activi- 
ties, and does not allow the mind of the time to sink into 
uninquisitive torpor. Unless it is mechanical and pedan- 
tic, exercising only the memory, it awakens the spirit of 
inquiry ; it pushes men on to know more, and especially 
to think about whatever is disputed ; it puts them in a 
questioning attitude, even towards what is ancient and 
established. It may beget conceit, and the feeling that, 
because they know a little about a good many things, they 
know all about the deep things of God. In such an al- 
tered condition as Education produces. Theology has to 
live, and do its work. Such an atmosphere, quick and 
electric, is better than one dark and lifeless. An age of 
freedom, of inquiry, of general intelligence, is more favor- 
able to truth, and to a living faith, than one when men do 
not think and do not care. Theology is the last science 



268 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

to ask for silence and unquestioning submission. Blind 
faith is no virtue, and has no spiritual power. The 
strength of Christianity is in the joyful enthusiasm with 
which believers accept it, as answering their questions, 
and satisfying their wants, and not as imposed upon them 
without reason, and against their will. I know that intel- 
lectual activity alone will not unlock the kingdom of hea- 
ven. I know it is the pure in heart who are to see God. 
I know that spiritual things are spiritually discerned. I 
know that faith enters where knowledge halts, and finds 
the secret of God which is hid from the prudent and the 
ingenious. But so, also, it is intelligence and not igno- 
rance, it is inquiry and not credulity, it is education stim- 
ulating the mind to progress, which creates one of the 
conditions favorable to the knowledge of God and his 
holy revelation ; favorable to theological inquiry, and so 
to theological truth. 

And what Education does for inquiry, it does still more 
for the intelligent reception of truth. There must be 
moral and spiritual receptiveness, or there is no faith, and 
Christ remains unknown. But there is much in Theology 
which requires the exertion of the intellect, as well as the 
meekness of the heart. Its questions require knowledge 
and vigor to wrestle with them. Its doctrines are not so 
simple or superficial that they can be understood without 
clearness of head, or be bound together into harmony 
without reach of thought. It may be that Education in 
some communities, that culture in some persons, runs into 
sentimentalism and a thin theology. It may lead them to 
think they know more than Christ and his Apostles, and 
to invent an improved theology of their own, whose virtue 
is in its negations, and which exhausts its requirements in 
good behavior. Even more, Education may set some 
minds flying in the vagrant winds of free thought, or in- 
flate them with notions which leave no room for the great 
doctrines of the Christian faith. And yet, with all perils 



THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION. 269 

to spiritual sanity, there must be intelligence, and conse- 
quentl3^ there must be Education, for the growth and 
power of a religion which has doctrine in it as well as 
feeling, and which is an exercise of thought as well as of 
emotion. Christian Theology is not an esoteric doctrine 
for its students and experts. It is to go out from the 
schools into the thought and life of the people. And un- 
less it is reduced to thinness and pap, it must find there 
some intelligence corresponding to its high argument. To 
keep up its own tone and vigor, to perform its grand 
work in the souls of men, it must be met, not by dullness 
and mental indolence, but by thoughtf ulness, by clear un- 
derstanding, by the grip of an interested and intelligent 
mind. And Education prepares that. 

And then, while theological science is cultivated by its 
schools, by its elect and consecrated students, we cannot 
in this place forget how much it is indebted to intelligent 
and educated laymen, who, unable to prosecute it them- 
selves, appreciate its relation to religious life and work, and 
to the brighter and mightier coming of the kingdom of 
God. They participate in the enlightened spirit which in 
our day and neighborhood devotes so much wealth to the 
cultivation of all other sciences, and to liberal education ; 
and they will not allow this to be neglected. The muni- 
ficent foundations at Andover and Princeton, at Upland 
and Hamilton, at New Haven and New York, at Roches- 
ter and Newton, the libraries, the professorships, the lec- 
tureships, show that Theology does not depend upon 
theologians or the clergy only. With intelligence and 
education for the management of productive business, 
they have sympathy with an occupation so remote from 
their own, with studies they cannot pursue. If unlearned 
in Theology, they have learned its value and its use. 
They have learned that the aqueduct depends on the res- 
ervoir, and that the city's water comes from the springs 
in the hills far back. They have learned that their 



270 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

money can be transmuted into what is better, — if not into 
Theology, into the libraries and schools and apparatus by 
which it is investigated and taught. This lectureship — 
long may it continue! — speaks to us to-night of this 
most intelligent kind of beneficence. And it is a sign 
that Theology and Education alike find appreciation and 
friendship in our churches ; that the men who laid founda- 
tions on this beautiful hill so many years ago have and will 
have their successors ; that, while on this sacred height 
professors and students keep burning the lamp whose 
beams shine far away, there are laymen who will see that 
its oil never fails, that its light shall never go out. 



II. THEOLOGY AND LITEKATURE. 

I AM to speak to you on The Relations of TJieology 
and Literature. 

It is part of that inter-relation of all truth, all know- 
ledge, all thought, which the student discovers before he 
has gone far afield. His special province he soon finds 
touches other provinces, contiguous and cognate. The 
sciences overlap and interlace each other. The spiritual 
borders on the physical, and similar laws, if not the same, 
run through both of them. The philosophy of ideas goes 
with the philosophy of facts. The universe cannot be 
severed from its Eternal Cause, and no part of it is en- 
tirely independent of any other part. The same human 
mind works in every department of thought and know- 
ledge, in the nearest and the remotest, in all science, in 
all literature, in the realm of principles and in the realm 
of events, among effects or among causes. And it is the 
Unity of God, and the unity of thought, and the unity of 
law, which bring together into some sort of relation, more 
or less apparent, things which lie far apart. Knowledge, 
which begins with single facts, goes on to group and clas- 
sify, to colligate and organize, till in its consummation it 
not only brings together all knowable facts, but brings 
them into order, relation, and whatever community they 
have. Towards this the advancins; knowledoe of the race 
tends. Remote and near are brought into union. Hid- 
den connections, correspondences, analogies, become clear. 
And though man in the present state may never hold in 
his little hand truth in its entirety, he grasps more and 
more of it, and discovers relations once unsuspected. 
Knowledge, inquiry, advances to the comparative stage. 



272 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

Comparison becomes a science, and is applied to all 
things, from the structures of life to the structures of lan- 
guage and thought. All literatures are interconnected, 
and Theology has its relations to letters, philosophy, his- 
tory, education, law, — to whatever man has thought, and 
whatever he has done. 

Theology is the knowledge of God. But it has its nar- 
row and its larger meaning. It is not religion. It is 
not Christianity. It is not life, the Christian life. It 
is thought, penetrated it may be by moral purposes and 
spiritual affections, but the thought, the collective thought 
of Christendom about God and his kingdom. It divides 
itself into theologies, and they are many. It reduces it- 
self to systems, and they are many. It includes the many 
processes through which knowledge and the conclusions 
of Christian thought are reached. It becomes scientific, 
even technical. It is science, as all sciences are, by or- 
ganizing its facts into order, system, under the methods 
and laws of knowledge and reasoning. As science, it em- 
bodies the results of criticism and of speculation, of spir- 
itual insight as well as critical inquiry and logical induc- 
tion. It is not simply science, for there is much Christian 
thinking which takes no scientific form. There is theol- 
ogy which is not of the schools, which does not put itself 
into dogmatic statement, which mixes itself with other 
forms of thought, which is untechnical and unprofessional. 
There is tJieologia j)Gctoris^ the truth of a spiritual experi- 
ence, worth as much as any product of the understanding. 
But it is all contained in that larger sum which comprises 
all the human mind, after long study and struggle, has 
been able to know about God. It is the use wdiich the 
human mind has made of divine revelation, inquiring into 
its methods, formulating its doctrines, vindicating its au- 
thority, setting it into relations with all other truth. It is 
the science, not of matter, not of mind, but of God, and 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 273 

only of matter and mind as related to Him. It is the 
science of the universe in one sense, because it is the 
science of God, without whom there is no universe. It is 
spiritual truth drawn from its eternal sources, put into 
order, into dogma even, — the translation of divine things 
into the language and thought of men. It is therefore a 
great and noble and serious science. It is, as Lord Bacon 
has called it, " that learning which both former times were 
not so blessed as to know, sacred and inspired Divinity, 
the sabbath and port of man's labors and peregrinations." 
As Coleridge has said, "There is one department of 
knowledge which like an ample palace contains within it- 
self mansions for every other knowledge ; which deepens 
and extends the interest of every other, gives it new charm 
and additional purpose ; the study of which, rightly and 
liberally pursued, is beyond any other entertaining, beyond 
all others tends at once to tranquillize and enliven, to keep 
the mind elevated and steadfast, the heart humble and 
tender: it is biblical theology, — the philosophy of reli- 
gion, the religion of philosophy." 

And Literature, too, has its broader and its more special 
meaning. There may be brought into it all writing, all 
forms of thought, so that it shall include even science it- 
self, and so Theology. But for our purpose it is the pro- 
duct of the human mind when it is exercised with refer- 
ence to the form as well as the substance ; when it pro- 
duces poetry, philosophy, history, and whatever is cognate 
with these. It is whatever has cast itself into literary 
form, whether real or ideal. As distinguished from sci- 
ence, it deals with thoughts rather than things, with sub- 
jective ideas rather than objective facts, with personal 
impressions rather than with exact truth. In it fact and 
imagination join, and it is in its highest form the product 
of the idealizing faculty which works all material, from 
whatever source, into words of beauty and power. Litera- 
ture is language clothing facts and thoughts, the dream 
18 



274 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

of the poet, the speculation of the philosopher, the lesson 
of the moralist, the truth of all things, in its own various 
dress. It is ancient and modern, of different nations and 
centuries and tj^pes, transient or permanent, stamped with 
the genius of an individual or of a country or of an age, 
the medium of intercourse between gifted minds and all 
minds, the preserver of thought, one of the strong pillars 
of human civilization. It is a great product and a great 
power, as Theology is. It is larger and more various. It 
touches the human mind at all points, its light and sober 
moods, its deepest convictions, its infinite imaginations, 
for instruction and for delight. Books do not contain all 
that man has accomplished, but a large and perhaps the 
best part. Into art, into government, into industry and 
trade, into great buildings and great cities, into life, he 
has put his genius, his power. But ideas go into litera- 
ture to live and be perpetuated, and that it is which best 
represents man, and is one of his great educators. Lit- 
erature belongs to high civilization, and is its consummate 
flower. It has its sins and diseases, as it has its virtues. 
It is no better than the men who produce it. It cannot 
do all things, for it cannot take the place of any other 
good thing in the social order, or in the spiritual life. 
But it has functions and uses which belong to nothing- 
else. For it is a power of mind upon mind. It is an in- 
tellectual, a spiritual force, in a world too much ruled by 
the senses. It has power to charm and to refine, to teach 
and to enlarge. According to its subject and according 
to its quality, is it a j)ower for good or for evil. Out of it 
come sweetness and bitterness, solace for the weary and 
sad, entertainment for our dull hours, for our mirth and 
our tears, inspirations for study, and truth for the curious 
and the hungry soul. It is a permanent fund for the sup- 
ply of man's intellectual wants. Into it come the accumu- 
lations of a hundred generations, the streams which run 
down from the mountain-peaks which spring out of the 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 275 

deep heart of the world. The folly in it perishes ; but 
that which is wise and true and vital endures, and repro- 
duces itself, and becomes seed for new harvests. Liter- 
ature intermingles with literature, the ancient with the 
modern, of one country with another, and the good of one 
becomes the common possession of all. Its great spirits 
shed their beams beyond the land of their birth, and by 
translation their works pass into the language and cultiva- 
tion of universal man. Its great works are the meters of 
human progress, as well as its impelling powers. When 
it declines, life runs low, and its spirit and beauty wane. 
It revives with the revival of moral power and spiritual 
earnestness, while out of the revival of learning come the 
reformation of religion and a new age of the world. 

Theology and literature stand side by side, are made to 
stand together now for an hour to be compared, to have 
their relations adjusted, to have their reciprocal influences 
measured, to touch their points of union or of oppugnance, 
that they may be seen in their double relation. 

I. A]id first, we remember that Theology begins with a 
literature, and has to handle it, to draw material from it. 
There is a Theology of Nature, which draws its know- 
ledge of God from the natural world, from the elder Scrip- 
ture in matter and in the mind of man. But the super- 
natural Theology drawn from Revelation finds its mate- 
rial in a written word, in the Scriptures of faith. The 
revelation of God is greatest and central in a person, in 
the unveiling of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ, in 
an Incarnation rather than a doctrine. But it is a revela- 
tion also in a Book. The Bible is a literature as well as 
a theology ; is a theology in a literature. And a very va- 
rious literature it is, from primeval history in Genesis to 
pictorial prophecy in the Apocalypse. It is narrative and 
lyric, biographical and historical, didactic and poetic, in 
all the varieties of literary form known to the Hebrews, 
and covers a period of fifteen hundred years. It begins 



276 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

in a Semitic tongue, though it ends in one of the Aryan 
languages. It rises in the deserts of the East, and ends 
in the great cities of the Roman Empire. It touches on 
the one side the grand and gloomy civilization of Egypt, 
on the other the gay and vigorous civilization of the 
Greek and the Roman. From the simplicities of Abra- 
ham's life, when God appeared to him among the hills of 
Canaan, to the logic and the passion of the letters of Paul, 
flying from city to city, is a long step. But the God of 
the patriarch is the God of the apostle, and He reveals 
himself in many ways. And it is the revelation of God in 
the history and the literature of Israel which is the endless 
study of the theologian. It is the revelation of God in 
this literature which has kept it alive, and, instead of per- 
ishing in the small land of its birth, it has scattered itself 
like coals of fire among most unlike and remote nations. It 
is this literature, as literature not equal to its contempo- 
raries, which has kept alive the knowledge of God, not in 
Judea only, but among the strongest nations of the world. 
A revelation as exact as a statute or a mathematical 
equation, handed down in a body, and put into a box for 
preservation, might make short and easy work for Theol- 
ogy. It might be given at once, or through one person, 
even through the incarnate Son of God, and in life, in 
act and suffering, as much as in word. But here it is in 
the most various writings, products of many authors and 
separated times. Here it is in writings which were for 
their own time, but which really are for all time. Here 
it is in prose and poetry, in simple narrative, in impas- 
sioned prophecy, in psalms for the Temple, and letters for 
Christian congregations, in such a dreary confession as 
Ecclesiastes, in such a " high and stately tragedy " as the 
Apocalypse. And the first office of the theologian is to 
extract it, to interpret it, to discriminate between the 
truth and the dress, the letter and the spirit, and so to 
reduce it from literary to scientific and dogmatic form. 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 277 

He has to determine how much of it is literature and 
how much theology, and how far they interpenetrate each 
other. He may not be able to put his knife into the ex- 
act joint where the divine ends and the human begins, but 
he starts with the fact that the Word of the Eternal does 
not come in any supernatural language, but in the very 
style and words, through the very hearts and convictions 
and lips of men. It is such revelation of God and the 
invisible world as can be made in human language, and 
through a literature set apart for this purpose. 

That in this interpretative office there must be an un- 
derstanding of the laws of literature, and in some sense a 
literary training, is clear enough to be seen. There must 
be much more, but there needs to be that. The fifty-first 
Psalm contains a profound theology. But it is written 
according to the laws of the Hebrew tongue, the laws of 
grammar, the laws of rhetoric, as well as the laws of spir- 
itual experience and the truth of God, and is to be inter- 
preted accordingly. Spiritual insight, or theological be- 
lief, cannot take the place of critical analysis. If it is 
poetry it must be interpreted as poetry, though its source 
be deeper than the very heart of David in the inspira- 
tion of the Almighty. Literary taste, literary criticism 
alone, would fall far short of its sufficient interpretation. 
The mere litterateur has slender equipment for a theo- 
logian, and undertaking to discriminate literature and 
dogma makes much of one and little of the other. And 
so many a theologian, interpreting by his system rather 
than by the laws of language, making no difference be- 
tween prose and poetry, cutting up the vital tissue of 
Scripture into severed proof-texts, applying logic to emo- 
tion, with no literary, perhaps no spiritual, sensibility, 
misses the real meaning of Scripture, and mistakes local 
or personal, or temporary or merely historical, peculiarity 
for everlasting truth. Out of the most unsystematic of 
books he has to draw such a system as he can. Out of 



278 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

the flora of Palestine, growing free and wild, various and 
full of life, he is to extract the essence, and bottle it for 
use. It is very difficult to do it, though it may seem 
necessary that it should be done. A theology true to its 
office, so far as it goes to the Bible for truth, must learn 
first of all to interpret, to find the true meaning of the 
book, and all parts of it, and understand the vehicle a 
well as the truth it carries. It cannot understand one 
without understanding the other. 

And then in what may be called practical theology, in 
lodging theological truth in the lay mind, in the use of it 
for spiritual edification and culture, it is of grjeat advan- 
tage that Divine Revelation comes in a literary rather 
than a scientific or theological form. The variety, the 
beauty, the style of the Scriptures, their intellectual in- 
terest and stimulus, that spiritual truth is put into the 
language of the imagination, the biographical, historical, 
human element in the Bible, — in a word, that its theology 
is so literary, — all this adds greatly to its force. It may 
add to the difficulty of interpreting, of understanding it. 
But it stimulates interest, inquiry, sympathy. It takes 
hold of men as no general, abstract statement can. Four 
fifths of the Bible is historical and biographical. Truth 
is put into example, character, life. And without any con- 
scious art it is often put with dramatic effect. It is often 
steeped in pathos. Much of it is in parable, and symbol, 
and figure. It reaches men through other avenues than the 
logical understanding, and so reaches them with tenfold 
power. Little of it is abstract truth. Nearly all of it is 
practical and close to life. It comes out of life, even the 
inmost life, and goes as far as it comes. And so it has 
become the reading of a hundred generations. " Our little 
systems have their day." Theologies come and go. Creeds 
even "are minished and brought low. " They fail to satisfy 
the spiritual thirst of the Church. But the Bible, because 
it is a literature, because it is a revelation in a most human 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 279 

and natural form, because spiritual truth speaks in the 
lano'uaoe of life rather than of the schools, because in it 
the divinest truths married themselves to biography and 
history, to song and letter, to human experience, to such 
literature as sprang out of the race and the times to which 
God spoke, has been the fresh, the continuous, the satis- 
fying teacher of the Church. 

II. As Theology springs out of a literature, so in its 
turn it also produces one. It makes its own literature. 
And theological literature has great bulk, and constitutes 
a very considerable fraction of the literature of the world. 
It is not simply Theology, systematic and scientific. There 
is a great body of that. From John of Damascus to 
Abelard, from Anselm to Grotius, from Calvin to Schlei- 
erraacher, from Turretin to Dorner, from the patristic 
theology to the scholastic, from the Augustinian to the 
Lutheran, from the Tridentine to the Rationalistic, the 
Church has been gathering a great store of organized 
theological thought. It is very various in quality and 
value. Some of it is dead. Some of it ought to be. 
Some of it belonged to its time, and is past. Some of 
it continues its influence under other names and forms. 
Some of it is subjective, and embodies individual and 
even singular opinion. Some of it is solid with eternal 
truth, and vital with Christ's spirit and po\^er. All of it 
is a part of the history of human thought on the supreme 
questions of life. Through it runs continuity, and a cer- 
tain genetic development, even through its conflicts and 
reactions. Put it all together, gather all the books in 
which it is written, and its makes an immense body of 
divinity, and a great body of literature as well. 

But it is not all doctrinal or systematic. Into Theo- 
logical Encyclopaedia come, besides, exegetical, historical, 
apologetic, practical, and even comparative theology, and 
the apparatus for each and for the whole is immense. In 
every department the number of works is enormous. And 



280 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

it increases rather than diminishes. No book, hardly any 
literature, gets so much study and comment as the Bible. 
Its interpretation, after all the centuries, does not come to 
an end, for its meaning is not exhausted. It is making 
new history. It is raising new questions. It has to settle 
accounts with every new philosophy. It comes into com- 
parison with Koran and Veda ; the theology of Christen- 
dom with that of all the other religions. The Greek and 
the Latin theologies, the Alexandrian and Augustinian, 
the Arian and the Athanasian, the Catholic and the Prot- 
estant, the earlier and the later, all have to be compared 
in their affinities and their differences. It defends itself 
against the new unbeliefs of every age. It employs an army 
of preachers to expound and apply it in all its relations 
to conduct, and the inner and immortal life of the soul. 
And so th6re is no end, hardly a bound, to its literature. 

It is not easy to draw a line between the literature 
which is theological and that which is religious. The reli- 
gious literature has in it more feeling, experience, life. It 
is less technical and more practical, less scientific and more 
personal. It is the flesh rather than the bones. It is 
mixed with other material. It parts with system and sci- 
ence. It is spiritual rather than logical. It has no dog- 
matic purpose. But, after all, theology lies back of it. 
It is theology applied, gone to flower and fruit. It is 
more religious than theological, and yet belongs to the lit- 
erature of theology. It has theological truth for its basis, 
though mixed with personal conviction, and clothed in the 
language of life. And of such literature, the offspring 
of theology, there is a great variety and a great abun- 
dance. It takes many forms, in biography, in history, in 
poetry and fiction, in treatise and discourse. Into two 
streams has it specially run. The sermons and the hymns 
of the Church have been the ex|3onents of its theology. 

The sermon belongs both to theology and to literature. 
In its substance it must be theological, or it amounts to 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 281 

little for its purpose. Whatever its structure, it must 
have a spine of truth, and to be effective it must be cast 
into a form quite unlike that of science and dogma. It 
must be argumentative, persuasive, impassioned theology. 
It must be theology passed through quite another process, 
and made over into a distinctively literary instrument. 
It must be, not the idea of the student, the theory of the 
philosopher, the doctrine of the theologian, but the speech 
of man to man. It may be the product of all other de- 
partments of theology, but it must be first of all homiletic, 
both in spirit and in style. In fact it must have style, 
address, that something which is added to bare truth to 
make it influential over the minds of men who hear. And 
this is personal, of the spirit, the faith, the passion of the 
speaker. This is literary, as belonging to the form as 
well as the matter, to the words as well as the thought. 
This is the product of literary as well as theological train- 
ing. The oratory of the pulpit is a special department of 
eloquence, and a very considerable one it is. It has its 
own rules and methods, peculiar to its subject and pur- 
pose, and yet it belongs to that great body of public dis- 
course which has added so much to literature. It is elo- 
quence, only in another form and for another end. The 
pulpit of Christendom has had its great orators, and left 
its great works. It has added very much to theology, for 
many systems have been put into sermons. Some of its 
great preachers have been great theologians. And all its 
great preachers have added to the literature of Christen- 
dom. There is the eloquence of sermons unreported and 
unpreserved ; the words of innumerable preachers through 
innumerable Sundays, written in no book, preserved only 
in their influence in human souls, and as powerful perhaps 
as those whose memory has been kept in books. And 
there is the long record of illustrious preachers, and the 
great volume of sacred eloquence, from Chrysostom and 
Gregory Nazianzen to Adolph Monod and Frederick 



282 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

Eobertson. They Lave lifted the sermon into a place in 
literature as high as that of the masterpieces of secular 
eloquence. It is through the sermon more than any one 
agency, than any literary agency, that Christianity has 
held its way in the world. Protestantism turns from 
what is done to what is said in the Church, from the altar 
to the pulpit, from the priest to the preacher, and its 
power is in the sermon. And the sermon must be as 
strong one way as it is the other; strong not only in what 
it says, but in its way of saying it. And then it becomes 
a contribution to theology and literature alike. The two 
join hands, and Christianity gains by the union. The 
truth takes form and life, and forges itself into words that 
go to their mark. The student becomes a preacher, and 
the sermon becomes more than his theology. It becomes 
a message from soul to soul. It puts on language, pathos, 
passion, ornament, whatever will transform speculation 
into conviction and truth into power. It takes the gun out 
of the armory and loads it. It arms doctrine, and sets it 
in the field to conquer. It is theology dressed, equipped, 
beautified, made persuasive, convincing, eloquent. 

The relations of Theology and Hymnology are apparent 
enough. They may seem to be remote. And yet, if the 
Christian hymns are the product of religion and of reli- 
gious feeling, it is the truth in religion which inspires the 
feeling, and finds expression in verse. A merely literary 
or sentimental hymn answers no good use of worship or 
of edification. It is as bad one way as a didactic or doc- 
trinal hymn is the other. Versified theology is intolerable. 
And so is versified sentimentalism. The hymns which 
live and take hold of the spiritual life have both truth 
and poetry in them. Hymns are to sing, not to teach ; 
for worship rather than instruction. And yet, as the 
Psalter rests on an underlying bed of truth, so our psalms 
and hymns must have their theology as well, if not as 
much, as the sermon. And it is in hymnology that the 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 283 

theological belief as well as the spiritual life of the Church 
lodges itself. It is a vital part of Christian literature. 
In it theology and literature come together. It is the 
doctrine of God, the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of 
immortality, which has been the inspiration of this litera- 
ture. As literature, it has not often taken the highest or 
a very high form, account for it as we may. Dr. John- 
son, in his life of Waller, argues in his positive way that 
poetry and devotion are incompatible, and that we cannot 
expect much from the religious poets ; that hymns must, 
from their nature, be poor. But with the multitude of 
poor hymns there are some good ones, and though the 
good hymns would not make a very large volume, they rep- 
resent a great deal of Christian belief and Christian life. 
Christian genius began early to compose hymns for pri- 
vate devotion, and for the worship of the Church ; and in 
every age, from Clement of Alexandria, even we may say 
from the time of Pliny, when Christians met "to sing 
hymns to Christ as God," the Christian theology has been 
singing itself in new hymns. Many have perished. 
Many will not pass critical judgment, though they still 
live. Many pass from one communion to another, and be- 
come the heritage of all the churches, and the sign of their 
common faith. In sublime antiphony the singers answer 
to each other, and no one of them singly satisfies the 
Church, or any division of it. The Catholic and the 
Moravian, the mystic and the ritualist, Ambrose the 
bishop and Watts the dissenter, Wesley the Methodist and 
Keble the Churchman, hymns ancient and modern, meet 
together in our hymn-books, and "one communion make." 
And if the shorter lyrics represent the private or the 
general Christian consciousness, there are the great hymns, 
the Te Deum Laudamus^ the Gloria in Excelsis^ the 
Stahat Mater Dolorosa^ the Dies Irae^ the De Contemj)- 
tu MundA, which represent the theology of the Church 
and of their time. And all together the hymns of the 



284 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

Church represent its true feeling and spiritual life better 
than its creeds. And they minister to it still more, per- 
haps. Formal and abstract theological statements have 
little power compared with the lyric and emotional doc- 
trine contained in the hymnody of the Church. Without 
music, without singing, without hymns, its worship would 
be dry and powerless. They give wings to prayer and 
praise, and often edge and fire to the preaching. They 
make an atmosphere for the preacher's word. There are 
confessions, aspirations, hopes, even beliefs, which want 
poetry and music for their expression. And there is much 
of our theology which is sung into the hearts of the people. 
And they believe it, because they can sing it, and because 
they have heard it sung all their days. 

III. But Theology not only produces a literature, it 
passes its own bounds, passes over into Literature, as a 
productive or at least an alterative power. And when 
we speak of Theology in Literature, I do not wish to con- 
found Theology and Religion. And yet I know how hard 
it is to separate them. We can sever them in our 
thought, and yet not in their influence. We may ascribe 
to one what belongs to the other ; to scholars and thinkers, 
to the philosophy of religion, what belongs to believers, to 
the beliefs and powers of spiritual life, to religion itself. 
And yet there is no religion without its philosophy. 
Wherever there is faith, there is something believed. The 
creed, the dogmatic statement, may not be an exact and 
adequate representation of the real belief which lies back 
of the spiritual life. Religion and the intellectual affirma- 
tion of it in doctrine may not correspond. And so, also, 
they may, and Religion and Theology may be mated as 
structure and organism, as body and life, as the rose and 
its fragrance. And whichever is prior, — whether the doc- 
trine or the life, the truth or the faith, be the cause and 
antecedent, — they are united, and cannot in real religious 
experience be severed. It is absurd to speak of Chris- 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 285 

tianity as a life, if by that is meant that it is not also a 
truth, a doctrine, a fact believed. It is the one because it 
is the other. And it has power in the world : it has gone 
into all things, into law, literature, ethics, civilization, with 
leavening power, because it has something in it, something 
real, true, divine ; because it is a fact, and has a philos- 
ophy like all other facts. It is a religion because it is a 
theology ; it is a theology because it is a religion. And it 
is evident that, w^hether in its intellectual form as thought, 
or in its religious form as life, or both together, religion, 
both as religious truth and religious faith, may enter into 
literature, as into anything else which it touches, with 
power and with effect. Scientific thought, philosophic 
thought, even social fashion and tendency, affect literature, 
and so quite as much does theological thought. It is a 
force, with other forces, to mould, direct, color, to elevate 
or depress, to enlarge or contract the literature of the 
world. And it does this according to its own nature. 

Ideas are the potent forces in literature, as in most 
human things. It may take its form from other influ- 
ences. It may have a certain beauty, and even powxr, 
while it is shallow, and pervaded with an entirely secular 
or merely literary spirit. Grace may go with flippancy ; 
elegance of language with superficial or false thought. 
Even in English literature, most of which is so sober, so 
opulent, so noble, there is some which is brilliant as it is 
worthless. Scepticism, passion, worldliness are in it, and 
even with such charm of style as belongs to the best 
things. But its fertile and splendid periods have been 
those of ferment and spiritual struggle, when great ideas 
w^ere moving through society, and new life as well as finer 
culture made itself felt in literature. And ideas, grand 
and beautiful thoughts, make themselves felt in style ; 
not always in rhetorical grace and ornament, but in eleva- 
tion, solidit}^, force. In Bacon and Milton and Burke 
there is something beyond the reach of art, a power back 



286 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

of the style, which makes that powerful even with its 
faults. They speak for something, for something besides 
themselves or for effect. Ideas, great and far-reaching- 
ideas, do not so much shape form and expression, but they 
give longer perspective, " the light that never was on sea 
or land," the shadow which falls from beyond the world, 
the tone, the spirit, the strength, the depth, which are not 
uttered in words, but which mark literature with a certain 
stamp of greatness. Ideas are not so much formative as 
productive, vital, impregnative. And they fill literature 
with power, a power of their own. 

And this is what Theology does. It supplies Literature 
with vital, productive forces, not so much in the form of 
dogmas as in alterative, regulative, efficient truths, which 
often work underground, which raise the temperature, 
which start and quicken new inspirations, which lift its 
level and broaden its outlook. For it is the office of The- 
ology to bring into the field of human thought an element 
which in itself and in its bearings is of first magnitude, 
and cannot be inefficient. It brings the whole realm of the 
supernatural to bear on men's conceptions of Nature and 
Life. God, Man, Nature, these make up the sum of being. 
These three make the staple of all inquiry, all thinking, 
all knowledge. We partition them to Theology, Litera- 
ture, and Science, inexact and intercrossing as the divi- 
sion is. They refuse to stay apart, though for certain 
purposes of thought they may be considered separately. 
And it makes a great difference, in human thought about 
Man and Nature, whether God is omitted or included. 
They may be known and understood by themselves as 
facts ; but when they are brought into relation with an 
Eternal Origin and Cause and Ruler, they take on a new 
complexion. We connect the universe with an Infinite 
Intelligence, and that great light behind it, and shining 
through it, transfigures it. That belief makes it another 
thing, though to the scientific intellect it is just the same. 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 287 

Indeed, science itself has made the universe new, a larger 
world of profounder secrets, and when Theology intro- 
duces its ideas and beliefs it does the same. Knowledge 
of Nature reveals it in its reality and glory, and know- 
ledge of God sheds into it a similar, perhaps greater, 
revealing light. 

Literature deals with Nature chiefly in poetry, but it 
would draw us too far aside to inquire into the modifying 
influence which Christianity has had upon the poetry of 
the modern world, and especially the poetry of Nature. 
It has had a great influence, and one often unintended 
and unacknowledged. Literature, however, deals chiefly 
with man, and finds its great field in human life. It is 
made out of human thought and experience, out of man's 
thought about himself and his condition and doings. It 
is man's story, his autobiography, his interpretation of his 
own nature and experience. 

" Quicquid agunt homines, votuiii, tiinor, ira, voluptas, 
Gaudia, discursus," 

as Juvenal said of his book, is the mixture in all books. 
He puts himself into literature, what is trifling, what is 
profound in him ; his thought, his life ; his life as much 
as his thought. And so, whatever goes into either, what- 
ever touches the deep springs of each, whatever gives him 
larger or profounder thought, whatever makes life more 
serious, more noble, finer and richer, shows itself in what 
he writes. And here it is that Theology comes to touch 
Literature with a power which is not in itself, with the 
powers of the world above and to come. For it comes 
not only to reveal God, but to reveal man to himself as a 
spiritual creature, and not a dusty meteor; the child of 
God, and not of mollusks ; heir to an endless life, with a 
personal immortality, and not involved only in a mighty 
cycle of cosmic changes. It comes to disclose the deep 
and awful mystery of life as moral, as subject to moral 
laws, as subject to moral evil, original and hereditary, as 



288 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

moved upon by powers of divine redemption, and taken 
up into a new life in God. It comes, above all, loaded 
with the grand mystery of Divine Incarnation, of hu- 
man life as shared and glorified by the suffering Son of 
God, and so in its purpose, its dignity, its destiny highly 
exalted by the divine partnership. It declares the king- 
dom of God, that it is coming, not up out of the heart of 
the race, but down out of heaven ; that it is coming, not 
in hope and dream and prophetic vision, but in fact, in 
mighty power, in divine beauty, in universal dominion. 
It sets every man into brotherhood with his race, and 
identifies humanity with Christ, the Supreme Man, the 
Eternal Son of God. It unfolds into intelligible order, 
into grandeur as a fact, into clearness and harmony as a 
system, the spiritual revelation of God, the holy redemp- 
tion of Christ, the truth not only as it is in Nature or in 
Life, but as it reaches beyond them, and connects them 
with an invisible world and an Eternal God. And so 
the truth of Theology, that which it through ages has been 
trying to explain, is not gathered from common observa- 
tion, the result simply of a human experience, or of scien- 
tific discovery. 

" Out from the heart of Nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old ; " 

and, deeper yet, out of the depths of the Infinite Spirit 
revealing himself to the world. They have power cor- 
responding to their source and their significance ; to their 
remote reach beyond earthly things, and their universal 
and perpetual verity. They have power, therefore, to pen- 
etrate the secret sources of literature, and feed it with 
such ideas and inspirations as contribute to its strength 
and its elevation, to its reverence and humaneness, to its so- 
briety and earnestness, to its sanity and beneficence, to its 
truth as well as its power, to all the noblest qualities in it. 
In two ways, at least. Literature feels the influence of 
theological truth. The first has been already intimated. 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 289 

It is a generative, productive force, for it supplies ideas, 
material, the stuff out of which literature is made ; not 
always in theological or any definite form, but as back- 
ground and support, as the understood and implied basis 
of other thought. There are truths, conceptions of the 
universe, of life, which underlie it, and are felt in it, as 
the stability and gravity of the globe are felt by every- 
thing upon it. They exert their influence often when 
they are disavowed, and many a poet is more Christian 
than he is willins^ to confess. Is there no echo of the 
Book of Job in Goethe's Faust ? Could Byron, or Shel- 
ley, or Victor Hugo escape the power of doctrines they 
did not consciously believe ? Must not Tennyson's " In 
Memoriam " have centuries of Christian theology back of 
it ? The Greek drama in its three great writers is strong 
and solemn with the Greek theology, — the theology of 
Nemesis following hard after guilt ; the theology of con- 
science discovering retribution without a revelation. The 
theology of the Middle Age is not more in the writings of 
Thomas Aquinas than in 

" The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme." 
Milton " drank deep from Siloa's brook," and found ma- 
terial as well as inspiration in the Bible, and in Puritan 
theology. What made Lycidas and the Paradise Lost pos- 
sible, if not these ? The unique, I might almost say the 
transcendent, book in English literature is " The Pil- 
grim's Progress." Its place in letters is something like 
its place in spiritual experience. Imagination has clothed 
the doctrines of evangelical theology in a form so homely, 
yet dramatic, in a speech so racy, and yet so intelligible, 
in a story so simple, so realistic, so thoroughly English, so 
thoroughly human, that a plain dissenting minister takes 
the primacy of the great divines, and almost of the great 
poets, of his country. And whether it owes most to the 
genius of Bunyan, or the theology of Bunyan, may be 
difficult to say. 

19 



290 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

I hardly know whether it is an instance of the influence 
of Theology on Literature, or of the independent testi- 
mony of Literature to theological truth, that the great 
element in human experience which it is left to Theology 
to emphasize, namely, the fact of sin, should have been de- 
lineated by great writers in a most untheological manner, 
and even by those who are most averse from a strong 
Christian theology. Fiction, dealing with human nature, 
and uncovering its secret places, has encountered this 
dread fact in life, and has to describe the struggles of the 
human soul with conscious guilt. It cannot avoid it, 
whether it be treated seriously or satirically. And the 
masters have probed far enough to find how deep and ob- 
stinate it is, and that Theology has not exaggerated the 
disease, whatever they may think of its remedy. Haw- 
thorne and George Eliot and Victor Hugo are far enough 
from John Bunyan in their theology. But in " The Scar- 
let Letter " and " The Marble Faun," in "Adam Bede" 
and " Middlemarch," and in " Les Miserables," there 
are pictures of sin and its secret working, and its sure 
retribution, which bring the orthodox allegorist and the 
unorthodox novelists into company. Whether Theology 
creates such experiences, or Literature finds them in the 
soul and in life and reports them, the two come together 
here on common ground, and respond to each other. 

And so it is spirit as well as truth, inspiration more 
than doctrine, tendency rather than belief, which Litera- 
ture takes from Theology. It may take ideas more or less 
bodily. But like everything human it is quite as suscep- 
tible to the subtle powers, the spiritual movements, the 
currents in the atmosphere, which come into it for evil or 
for good. And the mightiest and most penetrative of 
these are born of religion. It is not always that the con- 
trolling forces in Literature are those of charity, of right- 
eousness, of faith,, which Christianity supplies. But it 
has felt them, audi when it has, when a spiritual life has 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 291 

breathed its wholesome and reviviDg breath into it, it has 
risen into an instrument of power. Its great periods are 
those when it ceases from the play of fancy, and the part 
of mere polite literature, as it used to be called, and by 
its sincerity, its earnestness, its depth, shows that a 
stronger life, drawn from invisible sources, is struggling 
in its veins. Christianity has made a great change in the 
world's thinking. But it has also set afloat in the air of 
the world a new spirit, a temper, a tone of feeling as well 
as of thinking, something softer and yet harder, a more 
stringent virtue, and yet a more tender humanity, a breath 
out of higher regions, tempering the human atmosphere 
in which we live ; and that has been felt in modern lit- 
erature, and left there a distinct sign of a new element 
in it. 

Theology acts also as a conservative force in literature, 
and that it greatly needs. It has no power of its own to 
protect itself against the diseases and vices to which it is 
liable, and which vary according to the spirit of its time. 
No vigor of genius, no beauty of style, no stretched wing 
of imagination, no "intellectual power, which through 
words and things goes sounding on a dim and perilous 
way," no contact with real life, no infusion of practical 
wisdom, is sufficient to keep it pure, salutary, undecaying. 
It needs the moral power, the spiritual health, which come 
out of faith, and faith in such doctrines as Theology 
teaches. It needs in it and behind it the profound and 
controlling spiritual beliefs, which, whether they take 
theological form or not, exercise a restraining, purifying, 
invigorating power. Often it needs the curative and 
medicinal virtues of religion, always its vital and virile 
force. 

Literature, in the first place, is very liable to become 
utilitarian, and even in its ethics to follow prudence rather 
than right. The utilitarian spirit infects literature as 
readily as it does life, and with worse effect. For it is 



292 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

there we look for the power of the ideal. There, if any- 
where, the expedient must yield to a higher law. There 
truth and virtue are to find their fortress. There society 
finds leadership and the best inspirations. And when it 
falls under the dominion of worldliness, when it goes to 
the market for its law, when writers write for gain or a 
living, and not as prophets of ideas and teachers of their 
time, when it inquires for benefit rather than for truth, 
then Literature needs salvation, and can have it only from 
a diviner doctrine, which puts God on the throne, and an 
eternal moral law on the conscience, and confronts men 
with the wrong rather than the consequences of their evil 
deeds. Theology itself and the pulpit have been invaded 
by this doctrine which persuades men to be good that they 
may be happy, and tries to frighten them out of sin by its 
penalty. And when literature, ethics, and religion come 
down to this low ground, and utility is the test of all 
things, then the nobleness has gone out of life, and hero- 
ism out of human action, and the glory has passed from 
the heavens themselves, — 

" The pillared firmament is rottenness, 
And earth's base built on stubble." 

It is for a spiritual philosophy, a Christian theology, to 
bring men back to the eternal ground on which life is 
built ; to restore to Literature its lost health and virtue. 
The Paleys and the Mills may charm by the transparency 
of their style, but a literature pervaded by their philos- 
ophy cannot long hold the hearts of men. It is set to 
too low a key. Its poetry may be as metrical and musical 
as Pope's or Gray's, but it lacks soul, and the infinite 
pathos of that which has an eternal background, and rec- 
ognizes the majesty of duty, and the mystery of human 
life. The "literature of power " strikes another string, 
and echoes to a profounder and more heroic faith. It 
thinks of man and life after a higher style than the utili- 
tarian philosophy. It goes back where Christian philos- 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 293 

opliy goes, and from its great ideas and beliefs takes 
vitality and soundness, and an antidote against every de- 
basing tendency. 

Literature goes a step lower when in a materialistic age 
it catches its spirit, and loses spiritual clearness and eleva- 
tion. Literature and Art become the ministers, not only 
of utilitarian principles, but of unlawful passions, and, in- 
stead of arresting gross and sensual tendencies, surrender 
to them, unless the power of a true and high theology 
comes in to counteract. It is no evil that man subjects 
nature to his uses, and improves his outward life by mak- 
ing it more commodious. This is an evidence of his 
power, and of his superiority. But when the master of 
the material world makes it minister to his luxury or self- 
indulgence, when at its table he stimulates appetite, when 
by its conveniences he takes all strenuousness and self- 
denial out of life, v/hen " wealth accumulates and men de- 
cay," then degradation befalls civilization, and literature 
with it. And it is the spiritual which must triumph over 
the material. It is the revelation of an invisible world 
and of the spiritual side of life, it is the doctrine which 
maintains the supremacy of spiritual interests and the 
authority of God, that the soul alone is great and its re- 
demption is in a Christ risen from the dead, and that 
materialism is only athesism in disguise, which turns the 
tide, and pours into literature a sanative element. This 
only can substitute for the disgusting realism which smells 
foul to heaven a pure and purifying ideal. This only can 
purge the grossness of sensualism out of novels and poems. 
This must redeem philosophy from its bondage to sense, 
from theories which make genius and virtue, and faith 
even, the product of an evolution from the lowest forms 
of life, and even of matter itself. This is the mission of 
Theology in our day, one of its highest calls, to establish 
the origin of man, and the substance of human life, on a 
spiritual basis ; to assert the primacy of intelligence and 



294 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

will over all hereditary instincts ; to prove that mind goes 
before matter, and is its master ; and to advance the arms 
of a spiritual Christianity against all the passions and 
philosophies of materialism. It is a dread and mighty 
enemy, invading and subsidizing Literature, and so spread- 
ing and perpetuating its poison. But Christianity, if it 
has a philosophy, if it has a theology, and they have in 
them truth and power, is able to meet and conquer it. 

And with these evils, and after them as their sequel. 
Literature suffers from scepticism. And this is not so 
much a doubt about special points and peculiarities of 
theological dogma, as an unbelief which hides God and a 
spiritual world, and obscures or obliterates the funda- 
mental verities of religion itself. It goes deeper than any 
particular theology over which believers may differ. The 
existence and government of God, his incarnation in 
Christ Jesus, his revelation in the Scriptures, the power 
and work of his Spirit among men, the coming of his king- 
dom, and the immortal life, are truths at the foundation 
of Theology, and when they wane and perish out of the 
minds of men, they deprive Literature of blood and nour- 
ishment. Unbelief shuts it up in a narrowed world, under 
a firmament of brass impenetrable to prayer, under an 
eclipse which hides the infinite heavens, and contracts the 
horizon of life to our mortal years and our earthly inter- 
ests. And the Literature which has no wider outlook 
than that, which gives to trifles the dignity which belongs 
to everlasting things, which treats earthly things as if 
there were nothing above them, which only doubts where 
it does not scoff, which, without denying eternal truth, 
only insinuates its uncertainty, or makes light of its im- 
portance, lacks the weight and the force which give it per- 
manence, lacks the inspiration which lifts it into the broad 
fields of air, and sets it flying on sustained and sublime 
wing. There may be genius, as for instance like George 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 295 

Eliot's, which in spite of agnosticism has dramatic power 
and subtle insight ; but it becomes heavy and sad with its 
pessimistic doubts, with a despair which belongs wherever 
faith has been dismissed. It does not minister to the best 
part of our nature, to our hopes and our infinite longings, 
to our imaginations and our faiths, whatever it may bring 
for the gratification of sentiment or intellectual culture. 
There is a great deal of Literature sparkling with wit, 
beautiful with poetic grace, hard with good sense, copi- 
ous with information, but without profound conviction, or 
a serious facing of life and its questions, empty of moral 
earnestness or spiritual aspiration. It is intellectually 
brilliant, but not what mankind wants. Its negations dis- 
courage, and do not help to a better knowledge of the 
truth, or a dearer love of it. It destroys, while know- 
ledge and faith and charity and righteousness wait to be 
created, and society suffers by the loss. Doubt may have 
its office and its benefit in an age of superstition and cre- 
dulity. But it is not constructive. It produces nothing. 
And often it tramples on and withers the tender and sweet 
life of goodness which would come to maturity in the soil 
of faith. It cannot in an enlightened age penetrate litera- 
ture without mischief. Its tendency is to disintegrate and 
undermine, to blight fine feeling, to beget satire and cyni- 
cism rather than sincerity and courage. It takes the moral 
strenuousness out of Literature, and so lowers its tone as 
an intellectual production. Broad views, great thoughts, 
profound convictions, even catholic sympathies, grow out 
of faith. And so it is belief, it is a sound and reasonable 
Theology, it is the truth which Theology handles, and be- 
lief in it, which is the restorative, conservative, vitalizing 
element in Literature. It is the corrective of doubt, as a 
sceptical spirit, as unspiritual philosophy, as unbelieving 
thought, are the weakness and distemper of Literature. 

IV. And now, in its turn, what has been the reaction 
of Literature upon Theology? For theological thought 



296 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

is open to all the influences afloat, and takes direction, 
takes color at least, from other causes than those within 
its own bosom. It is not different from other kinds of 
knowledge and thought, because it deals with eternal 
truth, and has a divine revelation to start from. There is 
no rigid, fixed, unchangeable system, or, if there is one 
which is made so by the will rather than the reason of its 
creators and supporters, time, and the agencies which with 
time make change in all human things, leaves it behind, 
or sets it crumbling.^ We are on a river, and the point 
of view alters as we go on. It never continues in one 
stay. The hills are now on this side, and now on that, 
and sometimes turn out to be clouds. What seemed a 
mountain in front of us sinks into a plain as we leave it 
behind. It is with Theology as it is with all science. Na- 
ture, too, like truth, is a fixed quantity, her facts indubi- 
table, her laws unalterable. But the science of nature is 
in constant flux. What seemed to be a fact in the last 
century is not one in this. The knowledge, the interpre- 
tation alters, while nature remains the same, the ancient 
heavens, the stable earth, the old order, the fixed law. It 
is so with Theology. 

In some ages, and under certain ecclesiastical conditions, 
it seems possible to keep Theology fixed, in its symbols at 
least, though then, if there is any intellectual activity, the 
fixity is only outward and in seeming. But when thought 
is emancipated, and freedom in religion is absolute ; when 
philosophy, political economy, physical science, a demo- 
cratic spirit, diffused education, social reform, missionary 
propagandism come in to change the intellectual condi- 
tions under which thought goes on ; when Theology itself 
feels its conscious relationship with all other knowledge 
as never before, — it cannot escape whatever influence Lit- 
erature can exert upon its substance and its form. There 
are no fences to protect it from whatever wind may blow. 
1 Froude, Life of Bunyan, chap. ix. 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 297 

It feels the spirit of the age, whatever it is. Either in 
yielding or in oppugnance, it confronts whatever influ- 
ences affect human opinion, and makes terms of alliance 
or resistance with the thought of its time. 

In the beginning it started out in the face of the great 
and finished literatures of the ancient world. How much 
influence they had on the development of Christian 
thought, on the formation of the Christian creeds, is one 
of the problems of historical theology. The Apologists, 
trained as most of them had been under their influence, 
had to set themselves in antagonism to them, for they em- 
bodied in splendid form a mythology, a religious concep- 
tion, from which they had revolted. Some of the early 
writers, especially of the Alexandrian school, were ready 
to acknowledge any signs of truth, any foreshadows of 
Christianity, in the Pagan literature. But the break of 
the new religion from the old, from the whole spirit of 
the ancient world and its literature, was too decided for 
any willing debt to the heathen writers. Justinian closed 
the schools of Athens in the interests of the orthodox 
faith, as Julian before had interdicted Christians from 
giving instruction in the learning of the time, in the in- 
terests of revived Paganism. Bat early and late, earlier 
Plato, and later Aristotle, had a power in moulding the 
thought of Christendom beyond that of any Christian 
philosopher. It was the logic of Aristotle which domi- 
nated the scholastic theology. The feud between Nomi- 
nalism and Realism was inherited from the antagonism 
between the two great systems of ancient philosophy, and 
the quarrel became theological. And the Renaissance was 
but the restoration of the old literatures to their lost in- 
fluence. The Humanists brought them back, and made 
them contribute to the intellectual movement which was 
stirring Christendom when the Protestant Reformation 
appeared. The rise of the universities, the invention of 
printing, the capture of Constantinople and the scattering 



298 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

of its scholars, the new learning in Italy, and such pupils 
and teachers of it as Erasmus and Colet and Keuchlin, 
joined with the spiritual forces of the Reformation to lib- 
erate and re-fashion Theology. And as a sequel to that 
came a great and rich German literature, fruitful in many 
ways, and most intimately connected with a wonderful 
theological productiveness. Products of the same intel- 
lectual quickening, they could not be independent. Phi- 
losophy, with a genius and a vigor worthy of the best days 
of Greece, attacked every problem of existence and 
thought, and so could not help crossing the field of dog- 
matic theology at every point. Criticism, searching as 
any chemical agent, spent itself on every language and 
every literature, and carried its methods and its spirit into 
exegetical and historical theology. The great writers, 
like Lessing and Herder, Schiller and Goethe, Novalis 
and Pichter, Niebuhr and Schlegel, and the rest, created an 
atmosphere in which Theology took a wonderfully diversi- 
fied character. And if in some of its developments it was 
liberal beyond all bounds, and rationalistic beyond all 
reason, and speculative even to dizziness, the very spirit 
and freedom and boldness which literature infused into it 
has carried theological knowledge forward to a line never 
reached before. 

And this suggests the fact that Literature may be a hin- 
drance or a help to Theology. It has been both. It may 
weaken, and it may strengthen. I do not undertake to 
square the account between the two. Often, I imagine. 
Theology has shut itself up in its closet, as if jealous, or 
afraid, or even exclusive. But in this free age of the 
world it must meet all comers. Because it has such sure 
and sacred truth to hold and preserve and transmit, it 
can stand out on the open field and ask no favors. It 
ought to answer all questions without fear, as without 
doubt. With such truth in its hands, it must be careful 
and reverent. But it must not be timid or arrogant. It 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 299 

must give the liberty it asks. Literature may doubt its 
conclusions, may ridicule its claims, may pervert its teach- 
ings, may even put itself in its place, and undertake to 
answer its questions, without preparation and out of hand. 
But what then ? Let us see how the case stands. 

Literature may be a competitor, a rival, in influence. 
And herein it may have advantage. In poetry, in fiction, 
in history, even in philosophy, it may be more attractive. 
From the nature of Theology, from something in human 
nature itself. Literature is likely to find more readers. 
To be sure, Theology has no reason to complain. It has 
Sunday, a seventh of life. It has the pulpit. It has the 
Church. It has a good share of Literature itself. But 
as against depth and seriousness and authority. Litera- 
ture has more variety. It is lighter. It draws into itself 
more human feeling, the passions, the pathos, the humor, 
it may be the grace and esprit^ which Theology in most of 
its forms lacks. And so it may take from a great many 
people the interest, the hospitality, the sympathetic faith, 
which belongs to a higher order of truth. And so it may 
stand in the way, and be an impediment to the influence, 
if not to the cultivation, of Theology. In the student, 
in the preacher, in the course of liberal study, in the 
number of minds it enlists, in the place it holds in human 
thought. Literature may have a power disproportioned to 
its relative importance. 

And so it may weaken Theology, not only by subtract- 
ing from its influence, but by dilution, by diminishing the- 
ological enthusiasm, by substituting a literary for a theo- 
logical point of view, by producing in its student a critical 
and aesthetic rather than a scientific and evangelical spirit. 
The strength of Theology is in its truth. But as, accord- 
ing to St. Paul, the truth may be held in unrighteousness, 
so it may be held in feebleness, in misunderstanding, in 
inconsistency, in the letter and not in the spirit, profes- 
sionally, by tradition, by education, as a literary acquisi- 



300 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

tion rather than a spiritual conviction. Not that theolog- 
ical truth is weakened by wearing the best literary dress. 
Far otherwise. Not that it is not weakened in force by a 
harsh, crabbed, conventional, awkward, or feeble style, by 
want of logic and by want of proportion. For it is. But 
Theology is a science by itself, and deals with a truth of 
its own. And a mixture of other elements, certainly of 
superficial, foreign, or false elements, emasculates it. It 
may be too literary to be sound, to be vigorous, even to be 
true. 

Another influence of Literature ma}^ be to liberalize 
Theology, which may weaken or may strengthen it. That 
depends on the Theology, and whether it needs liberalizing 
or not. The dogmatizing tendency may go to an extreme, 
or all stiffness or solidity of doctrine may have fallen out, 
and left a Theology without a bone or even a muscle in it. 
In nineteen hundred years Christian Theology has taken 
many forms, and the student of its history finds that truth 
is a great deal larger than opinion, and that no theologian, 
no system, no church has its exclusive patent. It is a pro- 
gressive science, as all sciences are. And when somebody 
in his infallibility sits down and says, " There is no more 
to be known ; it is no use to go any further. Theology at 
last is finished, and here it is as I hold it," he is not even 
fit for the Roman Church, which possibly may allow a 
little difference of opinion. Theology is out in the world, 
and amidst the currents which wear upon the firmest 
things. Its foundations are not to be moved. But it has 
through all its ages felt the touch of time and change. 
And its ardent, believing students hold themselves open to 
the light, from whatever quarter it comes. And if Liter- 
ature, if Philosophy, History, Poetry, Fiction, loosen ex- 
cessive dogmatism, and extend the frontiers of theological 
thought, and replace pedantry by scholarship, and so join 
with the spirit of Christ to imbue theologians with pa- 
tience, with charity, with faith in truth rather than party, 



THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE. 301 

with love and trust as well as with courage and fidelity, 
Theology will not suffer, but in the end will grow to its 
full stature and strength. There is a liberalism which 
doubts if there is any truth, any certitude, any settled and 
idtimate Theology ; and it never finds any rest for its weary 
feet. It never helps any soul except into endless specula- 
tion and bottomless scepticism. It denies much and be- 
lieves little, and often is more liberal for unbelief than it 
is for faith. And when Literature becomes a lodge and a 
conduit for such liberality, it only weakens itself. 

And so, also. Literature may be a mediator and avenue 
of communication for Theology. We have already seen 
how much it owes to Theology, and it pays the debt as it 
receives into itself theological truths and influences, and 
becomes their treasurer and distributor. It takes toll on 
all it carries, for it thus becomes stronger, richer, more 
true itself. And so it serves a science which needs to 
have its conclusions put into such form as goes nearest 
home to men's thoughts and hearts. So it may turn grain 
into bread for man's daily consumption. So it may turn 
the truth of Christ into essay and discourse and poem, 
into the books which people read, and deposit in the lan- 
guage of the nations the mighty doctrines which have re- 
deemed Christendom out of heathendom, and changed the 
civilization of the world. So it may become religious 
without being theological, and spiritual without being 
scientific. So it may become the instrument of the 
highest thought and the evangelist of God. So it may 
take into itself the forces of divine revelation, and live by 
their vitality, and last when the literatures of sin and 
doubt and superstition perish. 

We are here in a school devoted altogether to the study 
of Theology, and where it holds the first place. All other 
knowledge, all other culture, is tributary to it. It is a 
noble, an exacting, a rewarding study, and happy are they 
who pursue it in the spirit belonging to it. To be well- 



302 THE NEWTON LECTURES. 

learned and well-grounded in it, not in some special and 
narrow part of it, but in the whole science, critical, doc- 
trinal, historical, practical, is the object of an education 
here. This institution keeps a high standard of theolog- 
ical learning, as understanding its relations to a strong 
ministry, to the growth and power of the Church, to sound 
theology and practical godliness. Well has it fulfilled its 
noble trust. 

From the course of thought we have been following for 
the hour, I think it will be seen that Theology does not 
stand alone. Supreme as it is in the studies of this place, 
and as it is to be in your future studies, there are also 
literary studies, which substituted for it would be for mis- 
chief, but which joined with it as ancillary may add to 
its value. Theology and Literature may be friends and 
allies ; they need not be hostile. The reconciling, medi- 
ating office belongs especially to all ministers of the Word 
who study Theology in order to preach it, and who will 
preach it most effectively as they are able to mix the 
truth it gives them with a spiritual experience of its 
power, and the literary culture by which they give it large 
and worthy and acceptable utterance. This, Christian 
brethren, is your privilege, and a part of your high call- 
ing, to possess yourselves of a sound, an intelligent, a 
thorough Theology, and to join with it whatever will make 
it useful, practical, effectual, faithful to your Master, 
Christ Jesus, and an instrument of salvation and of in- 
tellectual and spiritual enlightenment to all who hear it. 



ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 



i 



ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE.i 

Pkesident Axgell, Ladies and Gentlemen : 

The day which calls together the sons of a college to 
celebrate the privilege of their calling as scholars is bright 
beyond most other days in the calendar. It is sacred to 
thought, to reason, to inquiry, to good learning, to liberal 
culture, to one of the first interests of life. It is the birth- 
day of a new generation of students, who fill the vacancies 
which the years leave. It calls back the students of other 
days, many of them jierhaps remembering studies which 
more exacting pursuits long ago brought to an end, but 
while mourning the disappointment of their young dream, 
feeling for a day at least that they were once scholars, 
and have a name and a place in the goodly fellowship. 
It brings here the guardians, the authorities, the gradu- 
ates, the students, the friends of this great university, to 
exchange congratulations, to auspicate the future, to praise 
the scholar's calling and work. 

Eis Athenas was the choral strain of the Thracian 
maids. Up to Athens we come, to find under these oaks 
of Michigan a philosophy as genuine and as high as under 
the olives of the Academy ; to drink again the old inspira- 
tion ; to renew the sweet communion which belongs to 
every spot where study and learning find a home. And 
if many come who have served other gods than the classic 
* An address delivered at the Annual Commencement of the Uni- 
versity of Michigan, June 25, 1885. 
20 



306 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

ones to which they made their young vows ; who have 
found less room than they expected for the liberal culture 
which was their early aspiration ; who to-day confess that 
they know more of life than of letters, that affairs have 
displaced studies, that they have denied to scholarship what 
has been given to more tempting or more urgent pur- 
suits, — surely they belong here by birthright as by sym- 
pathy, and come up to Athens to pay, at least, the tribute 
which every good citizen owes to academic institutions 
and culture. Life has taken some flavor and charm from 
early studies, even where it has limited or closed them. 
Life has been making use of academic training in the 
midst of demands hostile to its continuance. And every 
student who has been drawn into the most practical and 
uTiclassic pursuits has at least his memory of earlier and 
dearer things, and in his departure may take shelter, at 
all events, under the authority of Lord Bacon. " That," 
he says, " will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if con- 
templation and action may be more nearly and strongly 
conjoined and united together than they have been, — a 
conjunction like unto that of the highest planets, Saturn, 
the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the 
planet of civil liberty and action." 

So, at least, life and literature seem to come together 
here and face each other to-day ; and called as I am by 
the partiality of an old friendship to be the voice of this 
literary festival, and obliged by an unwritten law of the 
occasion to speak of some interest of literature, what more 
natural than to examine the account between the two, and 
especially to calculate how much, after all, literature owes 
to life ! The other course appears to be more natural, per- 
haps suitable. One who has the ear of such an assembly 
seems to owe it to his calling and the occasion to plead 
the claim of letters as against all comers. In a University, 
and on its great holiday, it may seem an offense against 
the genius of the place and the hour to do anything but 



LTTERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 307 

declare the glory of letters. In a time and a country 
where industrial and political interests carry captive even 
our scholars, with so many to mourn that literature has 
not had its chance, and that even the universities are sur- 
rendering the humanities to scientific and utilitarian 
studies, it may seem disloyal to the mistress of our vows 
not to urge the interests of literature, and establish the 
great debt which life, which society, which civilization 
owes to it and whatever promotes it. But whichever side 
of the shield we face, be it silver or golden, we shall find 
that it has a reverse, and that the two are really debt- 
ors to each other. In fact, it may prove before we get 
through that it is for the sake, and in the very interest of 
literature, that life pushes its claim, and comes forward 
into the midst of this literary festival, and before this 
learned court, to prove it. We may find that the scholar, 
the writer, even the ]3oet and the dreamer, is indebted to 
the very life which in so many high waj^s is indebted 
to him. 

It has been the fortune of educated men in this coun- 
try — perhaps, to those who to-day revive recollections of 
3^ears given wholly to study, it seems rather a misfortune 
and hardship — to be obliged , even on account of their 
education, to mix actively with life and bear a responsible 
part in its burdens. They are the ones who have been 
drafted for the great exigencies of our civilization. They 
lead a strenuous intellectual life, but it is professional, 
rather than literary or scholastic. They sjoend enough 
mental power to produce a literature, but in works of quite 
another order. The intellectual enero-ies which have o'one 
into American civilization are neither small nor feeble. 
They have been mighty and productive. But they have 
run to something besides literature, whether better or 
worse. The national mind has not yet reached the late, 
ripe stage when it blooms most naturally into these finer 
products. It has been drawn into other fields, with fruit 



308 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

as substantial and necessary, if not as brilliant. It has 
been compelled to adjourn literature till it could build a 
better house to live in. Here was a continent to explore 
and possess. Here were states to be founded. Here was 
a national order to settle, even to fight for. Here was a 
bright, free, multiplying people to educate and evangelize. 
Here were great enterprises in commerce, in industry, in 
charity. Here were great experiments in education, in 
government, in religion, in social order, in which literature 
could have little weight. Thought, knowledge, genius, 
have been put into works of construction, rather than of 
culture ; into cities, roads, ships, the school, the church, 
the state. This immense, eager life, hot with irrepressible 
energies, fighting with the wilderness and pushing it west- 
ward, breaking out into sudden cities, into states which 
are empires almost as soon as they are born, tasked with 
the necessities of a new order of society, stimulated by the 
passions of a free democracy, excited by unusual oppor- 
tunities, running a race with the best things under the 
sun, charged with destinies as great as any which have 
ever come out of the world's greatest ages, it has drawn 
out all our funds for our immediate use, and left little for 
art and letters. The brain of the nation, which is not 
dull, has been taxed, perhaps extremely, by all this great 
demand. Had the mind of the country been suppressed 
into the small civic and economic opportunities of some 
European state, it might have been as fruitful in purely 
intellectual production. The water which might have 
supplied a few aspiring and sparkling fountains has 
been kept on the common level, and carried in more 
humble and useful courses from house to house. Our ex- 
periment would have come to a miserable conclusion long- 
ago if the genius of the country had been busy in litera- 
ture, breeding scholars instead of men. Literature has 
been compelled to wait, not by lack of intellectual force, 
not by defect of inspiration, but by a necessity profound 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 309 

as tlie providential purpose wliicli is creating a new his- 
tory on this side of the planet. In an ideal common- 
wealth, the scholar might have come first. In a small 
one, with a short course to run, literature might have 
ripened, early. But here, by profound laws of sociology, 
this was not possible. By the very laws which made the 
continent so wide, and the race of people so energetic, and 
the problems to be solved so complex, and life here so 
eager, so new, so practical, literary productiveness has 
been delayed. Either literature or life must give way, 
and the stronger has taken possession. 

And then, moreover, literature has been deferred by 
our having one already on hand. That immense intellec- 
tual property to which we are heirs compensated for all 
the loss we have suffered by the drafts of practical life. 
We entered upon our career with a literary estate on the 
other side of the sea large enough to supply our needs, 
while engaged in more exigent business. While the active 
thought of the nation has been depositing itself in inven- 
tions, industries, institutions, which carry forward civiliza- 
tion and give hope to mankind, its intellectual life has 
been fed from the accumulated supplies of other lands and 
times, and above all from the stores which English thought 
has gathered in five centuries as much for the benefit of 
America as of England. It has been worth a thousand 
years of history to begin with so much behind us ; that we 
could start with a literature, living and accumulating, 
which released the genius of this new world for other ser- 
vice. The literature of England is ours by every title, 
except that of being born here. It was the creation of 
our spiritual ancestry. It comes to us in the language in 
which we were born. It is hardly foreign or imported by 
simply crossing seas. That even gives it the unique flavor 
which native fruit might lack. And a great inheritance 
it is. The ages have furnished no better. Into it are ex- 
pressed the juices of the modern world ; the blood of the 



310 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

good races, the thought of the most virile and free ones ; 
the softness of the Norman and the mettle of the Saxon ; 
the renascent learning and the reformed faith into which 
the spirit of classic life and the finest forces of divine re- 
ligion descended ; the love of nature which belongs to the 
Englishman, with the love of truth which belongs to the 
loftiest souls. It traverses the whole width of human life, 
almost of the human mind. Rooted in the real, standing 
on the solid earth, it touches the ideal and infinite on 
every side. Mounting into the highest heaven of inven- 
tion, it is never lost in the clouds. Tender and gracious 
it is with pathos and an infinite humor ; pure and sana- 
tive with moral wisdom and spiritual faith ; so sincere, 
so catholic, so vigorous ; so opulent in matter, so various 
in style, so humane in temper. And then it uses, and 
enriches by using, a language spoken by more tongues 
than any civilized speech ; a language so pliant to all 
thought ; as stiff as steel and as elastic ; limber to love ; 
sonorous as a bugle to liberty or to war ; now homely and 
now stately ; clear with the lucidity of truth, and yet 
bright with the beams of poetry ; strong enough for any 
passion, and versatile enough for the lightest trifles or the 
most solemn discourse. The literature of England, pro- 
duct of so many struggles, of ages so different in their 
events and their temper, of a national life never monoto- 
nous, never stagnant, and even when insular, intense and 
vigorous, let it come alone, it would greatly enrich us. 
There is very little of it inapt or foreign. Later affluents, 
from France a century ago, from Germany in the last fifty 
years, have run into the main stream of American intel- 
lect ; but it is England which has given us most, and so 
much as to become a very controlling and vital fact in our 
history. For it has released the mind of the country for 
other work. In the midst of this work it has saved us 
from intellectual decline. In the beginning, when our 
fathers were cast upon bare nature, in the periods of tran- 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 311 

sition, when the backward tendencies which belong to 
life in a new country in its rude, exhausting conflicts with 
the wilderness were strong, and all through the perils of 
our history, this possession has been a part of our salva- 
tion. It has helped arrest tendencies toward barbarism, 
materialism, coarseness. It has kept open the doors into 
the ideal world. It has imparted to a new people the 
virtues and inheritances of age. It has kept us from 
breaking from that past in which the wealth of nations 
often lies. 

I know another opinion has prevailed. This has been 
mourned as an enfeebling and servile dependence on an- 
other country. It has seemed to forestall original produc- 
tion, and postpone an American literature. But is it not 
a spurious Americanism which is willing to refuse what is 
truly ours, and alienate it because it was not born in our 
woods ? Is it an un-American economy to buy in other 
markets what we cannot produce at home ? or to borrow 
where capital is abundant and interest is low ? Should we 
have gained anything by a protective tariff, not on English 
books, — that is bad enough, — but by excluding English lit- 
erature in order to have one of our own ? That would be 
the last way to produce one. We need not be so jealous 
of Englishmen. Shakespeare was of the same race, and 
the same class in society, which colonized the shores of 
Massachusetts. Had he been a score of years younger, 
he might have come here himself, leaving a copyright of 
his plays in England, where for a time they would cer- 
tainly have been better relished. Milton and Eoger Wil- 
liams learned languages together, and, what is better, were 
of the same faith in regard to civil and spiritual liberty ; 
and the poet, like the philosopher Berkeley in the next 
century, might have sought a home on the shores of the 
Narragansett. But this would not have made Lycidas or 
Comus any better poetry, or any more truly ours. There 
is no Atlantic in that ideal world which the poets make. 



312 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

English letters belong to all English readers, whether by 
the Thames or the Hudson, whether in the ranches of 
Colorado or the sheep-walks of Australia, wherever a 
newer England has transported itself, as well as in the old 
home of the race. And the debt we owe to England we 
are fast cancelling, and may one day wipe out. For, with 
all else we have been producing, in due time a literature 
will come. M. De Tocqueville, one of the most philo- 
sophical critics of American life, said fifty years ago : " If 
the Americans, retaining the same laws and social condi- 
tion, had had a different origin, and had been transported 
into another country, I do not question they would have 
had a literature. Even as they now are, I am convinced 
that they will ultimately have one." There has been 
power enough for it, original, creative, plastic, but it has 
cast itself into other than literary forms. Secure against 
intellectual impoverishment, the quick mind of the coun- 
try has applied itself to that which was nearest, most 
necessary, and for the time better. It has borrowed poets 
and made our history a poem. It imported literature, 
while it was translating the highest political philosophy 
into a state. It printed its works not in books, but in 
schools taught at the public expense, in the constitutions of 
forty republics, in the biography of a nation which in two 
hundred and fifty years has done the work of ages. In- 
vention has not gone into Iliads or Infernos ; it has not done 
the work of Cervantes or Moliere ; but it has saved Amer- 
ica from the doom of Spain, and the American Revolution 
from being an anticipation of the French; it has been 
finding out, instead of paths in the ideal, the short roads to 
commodious life, and universal knowledge, and regulated 
liberty ; giving to unborn millions an inheritance such as 
the country of Dante has waited for a thousand years. 

Students, jealous for other interests, may lament, with 
not unnatural regrets, that so much power has not been 
put to finer uses. It seems as if a nation, which grows at 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 313 

the rate of fifty millions in a century, might at least pro- 
duce some great genius, and a literature as great. But 
literature at the expense of life ; an excellent poet or two, 
and no Declaration of Independence ; great ideas in books, 
and no ideas of justice or liberty wrought into power 
and a commonwealth ; fine arts and a wretched popu- 
lace ; a Vatican with Raphael in one wing and a Pope in 
the other ; a nation with more mouths than bread, servile 
and shiftless and decaying, with elegant writers to tell its 
story and sing its poetry, — is not the destiny we started for, 
or for which our scholars need vent their unavailing sighs. 
With literature enough, old and new, to satisfy the most 
eager demand ; with as much scholarship as we could make 
use of ; with every faculty of human nature roused, and 
rushing to fill the unusual opportunity ; with more mind let 
loose and set to school than in any nation on earth ; with 
inventive brains multiplying so rapidly, not content to 
repeat the past, and ready to explore new realms of 
thought as they find those of life occupied, — it is hardly 
necessary to be mortified yet at the failure of Iliads. The 
glory of action, the triumphs of liberty, the successes of 
life, are not the defeat and cessation of letters, but may 
become their inspiration. Indeed, between life and litera- 
ture there are secret understandings and communications, 
there are preparations and nourishments, which will one 
day appear and justify the delay. That has been first 
which comes first, and that will follow which is all the 
greater when it follows than when it leads. Life, great, 
original, rich life, will produce literature, because they 
are at last products of the same power, and because liter- 
ature is a product and exponent of life itself. 

It is a notion, rather narrow and pedantic, that a book is 
the only intellectual work ; that literature and art absorb 
aU the genius of the world. There is a great deal of 
hard study which is not done in colleges. The cotton-gin 
and the telephone cost study as much as Mill's " Logic," 



314 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

or Darwin's " Origin of Species." There is a greal deal 
of thought which is not put into libraries. Twenty-five 
years ago we put ideas into guns, which types were too slow 
or too feeble to utter. When the great hours of liberty 
come, it is the bayonets which think. Franklin had genius 
enough for a new system of philosophy, or a new depar- 
ture in literature, if he had not given it to the indepen- 
dence and constitution of his country. The orations of 
Henry and Burke are great and splendid, but so was the 
sword of Washington. Why should eloquence be greater 
than generalship ? It was the battle of Gettysburg which 
made Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg the most eloquent 
utterance of our time. It was the inspiration of Harvard 
College, not with her sons dreaming in the still air of de- 
lightful studies, but prompt in the sharp sacrifices of war 
for the country, which made Mr. Lowell in his Commem- 
oration Ode touch the high-water mark in American po- 
etry. Ideas do not express themselves more in the forms 
of language than in mechanisms, manners, industries, in 
emigrations, revolutions, institutions, worships. Civiliza- 
tion is greater than literature, for it not only contains 
and uses it, but it involves an immense expenditure of 
the same mental force which creates it. Civilization is 
the poetry, philosophy, knowledge, invention, thought, the 
genius and the faith of a people or an epoch, translated, 
not into words only, but into all possible forms. Taste, 
inventiveness, knowledge, ideas, and whatever mental 
qualities enter into many forms of literature, are also 
called into action in all civilized and cultivated life. The 
forces which stir and direct the life of our time will at last 
lodge themselves in literature ; but they have their birth 
and action outside of it, and will use literature by and by as 
their expression, as they now use more utilitarian vehicles. 
Literature, indeed, may be the best part, and one of 
the highest forms, of civilization. It is one of its crea- 
tive and conservative forces. Its office is most needful 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 315 

and precious. It fixes the fluid forces of thought, and 
'* preserves as in a vial the purest efficacy and extrac- 
tion " of the best minds. It is, as Milton has said, " the 
seasoned life of man." It keeps the continuity of the 
world's thinking, and stores food for new generations. It 
is the ministry of great souls to the multitude of men, 
the motor of thought, the nourishment and the solace of 
souls who cannot create it for themselves. It is a great 
social factor, contributing to the progress of the race. 
To-day is our tribute to it. This University is the ac- 
knowledgment of its value. Our civilization would be 
very coarse, and indeed very poor, without it. And yet 
the intellectual and sj^iritual energies whicb put on the 
robe of life, and go forth to answer the calls of civiliza- 
tion, are from the same source, and serve a want as true, 
perhaps for a time as sacred, as learning or poetry. They 
may even run ahead of literature, and lay a path for it 
into the ages to come. 

But the peculiarity of literature is, that it employs lan- 
guage as its single instrument. Into that poetry, philos- 
ophy, history, put themselves for preservation and for 
power. And language is the child of life, as well as of 
thought, and must be recruited from other than literary 
sources, or it falls into decay. Writers like Dante, and 
Chaucer, and Luther, turn their native tongue into liter- 
ary form, and so fix and purify it. Italy, England, Ger- 
many, owe their language to their writers. But it was 
first born of the life of the people before the authors 
used and finished it. They found every word almost in 
common circulation. They took up the dialect of the 
people as it formed itself in their common ways and do- 
ings. It was the use of living words, with the blood still 
in them, — words which came out of the passions, the con- 
flicts, the necessities, the uses of every-day life, — which 
gave power to their works. Otherwise they would have 
been remote from men's interests and sympathies, and 



316 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

would have perished early. Ideas, however high or re- 
mote, find their clothing in the common market of life, 
where the people buy and sell. Thought must go to life 
for its words, its figures, its communications. Literature 
is indebted to life for the instrument it uses, and by which 
it is preserved ; and every language must have running 
into it a stream of fresh life from the world, rather than 
from books, or it becomes sterile. " Literary dialects," 
says Professor Max Miiller, " or what are commonly called 
classical languages, pay for their temporary greatness by 
inevitable decay." ^ To adopt his figure, the literary lan- 
guage freezes, as a river does, smooth, brilliant, stiff, till, 
in warmer weather, new life breaks loose, cracking the 
crystal surface ; and popular language, like a spring flood, 
revitalizes the old dialect, and gives it freshness and new 
force. Language becomes reflective ; " sicklied o'er with 
the pale cast of thought," it becomes artificial and obso- 
lete, when it is withdrawn from the living world and is 
no more the speech of the people. 

We need not think that somehow literature has suc- 
ceeded in adding something to life which is not already in 
it, and that it is something other and finer and stronger in 
making more out of life than it actually contains. In- 
deed, life contains and reveals what does not go into writ- 
ing, and is itself only a sublimer literature. No history 
is equal to the facts back of it. The life of persons and 
of nations is full of unwritten histories and poetries. 
There is a poetry in life before it is in words, though they 
be its most cunning and touching revelation. If poetry 
idealizes life, life realizes poetry. The true may surpass 
the invented. I am ready to think a drama of Racine 
hardly equal to the tragic story of Joan of Arc, and that 
the mimic Shylock or Lear may not surpass the real one. 
It is, indeed, the high office of poetry to extract and con- 
dense the finer spirit of beauty in the common and liomely 
world about us, — 

1 Science of Language, First Series, p. 69. 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 317 

" Clothing the palpable and the familiar 
With golden exhalations of the dawn." 

But as nature precedes art, as a sunset of Claude or 
Turner is no finer than every one of us has seen inflam- 
ing the west, so genius only discovers with finer insight 
the beauty and sacredness already in life, and invests it 
with ideal glory. It may be the ideal w^hich charms us, 
but the glory and the mystery are there in life, revealed 
or unrevealed. This life of man in a single soul, its ap- 
petites, its aspirations, its joys, its glooms, its beliefs, its 
sins, the stamps of heaven, of hell upon it, the possibili- 
ties, the eternities which are in it ; the complex, multitu- 
dinous life, beating everywhere in cooperative or contend- 
ing energies ; the wild, the beautiful, the useful, royal with 
a glory from above the stars, tamed to the touch of Christ's 
cross, gloomy with wrath or with misery, grand in its 
efforts or achievements ; in the huts of the poor, in the 
crowd of the streets, flying across seas, bursting into wil- 
dernesses ; hungry and fierce and sour, how^ much of it 
unspeakably great and touching even in its wretchedness 
and its ruin, — this marvelous life of man, what study so 
gTand or instructive, what literature contains so much, can 
equal or express it ? Says the historian Menzel : " Lit- 
erature mirrors life, not only more comprehensively but 
more clearly than any other monument, because no other 
representation furnishes the compass and depth of speech. 
Yet speech has its limits, and life only has none. The 
abj^ss of life no book has yet closed up. It is only single 
chords that are struck in you when you read a book ; the 
infinite harmony which slumbers in your life, as in the life 
of all, no book has entirely caught."^ 

It is life which furnishes staple for literature, as nature 
does for science. The two may overlap, and pass and 
repass into each other's realm. For science has under- 
taken, or theorists in the interest of science have under- 
^ History of German Literature, i. 15. 



318 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

taken, to subject, not the physical universe only, but the 
works of human will and genius, and the moral world as 
well, to its inquiries and its laws. M. Taine attempts in 
literature and art, and Mr. Buckle attempts in history, to 
carry out a theory which brings nature and the mind, the 
genius of Chaucer or Rubens, the civilization of Spain or 
India, into the same realm of law. Comte and Mill see 
no reason why the spontaneousness of human genius or 
passion or will should be less scientific than the perturba- 
tions of Saturn, or the crystallization of a ruby. It is 
life, the secret and law of it, it is the scientific law of lit- 
erature, as of all human production, they are after. 

And literature, too, especially poetry, on its side takes 
nature, even after science has opened and turned it inside 
out, and uses it for its own ideal purposes. It adds a pre- 
cious seeing to the eye, so that nature is transfigured by 
it. It takes up nature into itself, into human feeling, and 
unites it to the joys and sorrows and longings of human life. 
It does not describe nature, nor dissect it, but idealizes it. 
It colors nature with its own passions, and it is sad or 
glad according to the poet's moods. So it brings nature 
and life together, and throws upon the outward world the 
reflections of the life within. It deals with nature as sci- 
ence cannot, not after the exactness of truth, but after the 
freedom of impression, giving its own interpretation to it, 
and using it, as it uses all other things, after a law of its 
own. 

But after all it is life, rather than nature, which fur- 
nishes the matter and inspiration for literature. It is not 
the world man lives in, but himself, and whatever life is 
in him, which goes into the creations of genius. It takes 
in the outward world only as it flows through his thought, 
and is shaped and colored by that. And it is not then 
out of the impersonal reason, out of depths of abstract 
truth back of all human and even individual experience ; 
or, if from those far recesses, it is truth as it comes iuto 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 319 

life to be bathed and dressed and used. There is a litera- 
ture which is entirely bloodless and impersonal, and very 
much of it comes of no life, and reaches none. " Sir," 
said Hazlitt, " I am a metaphysician, and nothing makes 
an impression upon me but abstract ideas." There are 
books like Sydney Smith's satirized friend, whose intel- 
lects were improperly exposed. They need to be dressed 
with some form and power of life before they can come 
in contact with men, and into the living thought of the 
world. The book which is charged with the life of the 
author, and the life of his time, carries in it the weight 
and force which make it last. Men's hearts go after that 
which has heart in it, and the touch of kindred life. An 
author's genius will take color and turn from his own ex- 
perience. This gives it individuality. Unless his life is 
as rich as his genius, his work becomes thin and sterile. 
The great poets have a hardy realism w^iich shows that 
they were fed on something beside ambrosia. They are 
as true to life as they a.re to their genius. Their poetry 
springs from their age as well as from themselves. They 
are in sympathetic relation with the thoughts and forces 
and movements of their time, and become its best interpre- 
ters. If they go far away, as Milton did in his epic, to find 
subject and characters and epopee, they bring their crea- 
tions into the world in which they live, and Adam and Eve, 
and Raphael and Abdiel, talk like English people of the 
seventeenth century. If Homer ever loses the credit of the 
Iliad, it will be because it seems to be born of many minds 
of the Homeric age rather than of his own brain, and is 
too representative to be individual. It is a poet's fancy 
of Coleridge, as he himself acknowledges, that the blind 

bard — 

"Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey 

Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea." 

He saw it all in life before the waves on the Chian 
shore started the inward echoes, and he set to song the 



320 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

great life which had beat like a stormier sea on the coast 
of the Troad. This is the charm of the classics, which 
keep their hold, their yet unshaken hold, on the modern 
world. Says Dr. Temple, lately made Bishop of London : 
" The classics possess a charm independent of genius. It 
is not their genius only which makes them attractive : it is 
the classic life, the life of the people of that day ; it is the 
image there only to be seen of our highest natural powers 
in their freshest vigor ; it is the unattainable grace of the 
prime of manhood, it is the pervading sense of youthful 
beauty. Hence, while we have elsewhere great poems and 
great histories, we never find again that universal radiance 
of fresh life which makes even the most commonplace 
relics of classic days models for our highest art." ^ The 
" Canterbury Tales" of Chaucer are simply the fourteenth 
century of English life put into poetry. The form and 
pressure, the manners and spirit of the time, even its fugi- 
tive aspects, are caught and photographed. For this is the 
office of all literature and its use, that it catches and keeps 
what otherwise would evaporate and be lost. That liter- 
ature of power, which De Quincy^ so finely discriminates 
from that of knowledge, is the literature of life, which de- 
scribes the manners, unfolds the relations, reveals 'the 
secrets, comes home to the business and bosoms of men, 
and sheds light on their true life and destiny. It is the 
exponent and translator of life, which, without it, would 
disappear. And its great waiters are those who, if their 
souls, like Milton's, were " like a star and dwelt apart," 
were also mixed closest with the deeper life of their time. 
Rarely, perhaps never, is individual genius able to escape 
the influence, to withstand the spirit of its age, that larger 
genius which embraces and breathes through all its chil- 
dren. The life of an epoch is mightier than any soul in it, 
and stamps itself into the thought and words of even those 
who come into it puissant to rule, or dreadful to purify. 
1 Essays and Reviews, p. 27. ^ Essay on Pope. 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 821 

The verse which seems spontaneous as the blowing of 
winds, or the growth of clover, takes always some hue and 
temper, some stamp of conformity or resistance, from the 
nature and society, the place and the period, in which it 
was born. The poet of the Merrimack and the poets of 
the Charles have not only enriched American literature, 
but have illustrated American life. The struggle with 
slavery beats and shouts in the verse of Whittier, as it did 
not even in the clash of swords. As Mr. Lowell this sum- 
mer leaves England, an English writer has said of " The 
Biglow Papers : " " They give the most perfect literary 
expression to a great secular movement, and will always 
remain as the interpretation of it, throwing more light on 
its causes and characters than the records of historians, 
or the dissertations of moralists." This great conflict of 
ideas, more and more taking possession of the second gen- 
eration of American life in the nineteenth century, and 
precipitated at last in a bloody shower, has perhaps not 
yet produced all its spiritual fruits. The periods of liter- 
ary fruitfulness do not always synchronize with those of 
aroused and strenuous action. It would seem as if the era 
of great and crowded life must necessarily quicken genius, 
and issue in a richer harvest. But it may be too tem- 
pestuous, and poetry may wait for the calm warmth of the 
Indian summer to ripen. It may exhaust rather than 
nourish. Its violent passions may burn rather than warm, 
and break the crust for the fertile vineyards of the next 
generation. It may force intellectual action away from 
poetry. It may spread it over a vast space and great 
numbers ; while if it were compressed into a narrower and 
more peaceful life, it would flower into a richer and rarer 
literature. It may emancipate political rather than poetic 
tendencies. It may start inspirations which will pervade 
the national life, and run into literature at last. But by 
and by it will show that genius, scholarship, literature, 

21 



322 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

cannot escape the forces which belong to a period so 
eventful as the last fifty years. 

The latest and fullest development of literary activity 
in recent times is in prose fiction. The writing which 
covers most paper, reaches most eyes, and is devoured 
with most satisfaction to-day, is the novel. For the 
majority, the philosophers, the historians, the poets, stand 
aside for the novelist. You may say his touch is superfi- 
cial, and that people never return to the best novel as they 
do to the great poems and histories. You may say that the 
truth in it is thin and not deep, that it takes hold of the 
fancies of readers rather than their convictions, and that 
out of the crowd of them few novels survive a twelve- 
month. After all has been said, and after it is said, as it 
may be, that the novel has not yet attained its ideal func- 
tion as a teacher of truth, nowhere is life found in such 
variety, in such extremes of pathos and humor, tragedy 
and comedy, in such truth to itself. In history, in bi- 
ography, in philosophy, there may be more fact, and, in 
form at least, more reality. But the novel is the book of 
life, and, when it is at its best, of actual life. Life sup- 
plies its motive, its story, its persons. Life gives it charm 
and power. Whatever it may have in it, — noble truth, 
rhetorical beauty, ingenious plot, — if it has not actual 
life, men and women as we know them, the passions, the 
doings of living men, it fails. If it does not interpret life 
and make us know it better, if it does not let us into the 
secrets of life, not of the day only, but of that life which 
in its ruling passions is the same all days and everywhere, 
it has no use, and goes to kindle the fire in the kitchen. 
It is waste paper and waste writing, for it does not speak 
out of life into life. But in its multitudinous progeny, it 
is a testimony to the power which in later times life has 
acquired over literature. It tells how much more men 
want to know about themselves ; that, not satisfied with 
biography and history, the imagination has been set at 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 323 

work so industriously to invent what literature in no other 
way could supply. 

Literature comes out of life. So it returns thitlier with 
its gifts, to become the minister as well as the interpreter 
of life. It is not tributary simply to intellectual culture. 
It nourishes the mind, but it does no more. It serves the 
uses of life, its finer and more spiritual uses. It cannot 
be weighed in the scales of the market, though literature 
has its mercantile value. But the five pounds for which 
Paradise Lost was sold was enough for it if it had not 
been above all price. Books are worth, not what they sell 
for, but the contribution they make to the better life of men. 
Literature has come to this test, as does everything in the 
world. Genius must obey the same law with much coarser 
things. It must be of use. It may be spontaneous in its 
work, as the highest genius always is. It may have no 
conscious purpose of utility, of anything but to sing its 
song and say its say, as the new hay is sweet, or the 
stream runs at its will. But to this test it must come at 
last. All literature that lives, and is cherished in human 
love, has this quality. It is of power to breed better 
thoughts, to take us out of ourselves a little, a little above 
ourselves, to help us forget, to help us remember, " to in- 
form man in the best reason of living," to make his life 
great wdth thought, with knowledge, with spiritual excel- 
lence. Life is better than learning, is the test and the 
end of it. Life is greater than literature, as all the rivers 
run into the sea, and it is never full. The ambition to be 
a learned man, with no reference to use, to life, is no bet- 
ter than the ambition to be a fat man. They are some- 
what the same. The book which answers no use of life, 
of real and good high life, has no use at all. If it neither 
excites nor expands, nor chastens nor nourishes, if it is 
not constructive as well as instructive, if it does not beget 
more life, if it does not invigorate the energies of the ra- 
tional spirit, let it go back to the paper-maker. Litera- 



324 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

ture is a servant, and may serve noble or mean interests. 
It is an instrument, and has its part in the great struggles 
and achievements of the age. It gives direction and 
anchorage to the thoughts of men. It creates influences, 
a soil, and intellectual climate more potent than any 
physical circumstance. It may answer base uses and the 
best. It may be the word of life or death which quickens 
or petrifies centuries. But its splendor, its virtue, its end 
is to beget more life and fuUer. It is the chariot and not 
the goal. It is a thing by the way, and at the end is life, 
true, large, beautiful, eternal. 

But literature is liable to perils and mischiefs, from 
which it is saved by contact with life and the real world. 
There is a great deal of healthy literature, and a great 
deal that is morbid and lacks sanity. Its diseases come 
generally from too much thought and too little life. Its 
blood is thin and sublimated. It is sick for want of air 
and exposure. It is too fine-spun and speculative. It 
wants an infusion of sense and mother- wit. It needs to 
touch the ground, however far it flies toward the moon. 
It must go out of doors into the hard and wholesome life 
of the world. Life is curative and medicinal. It corrects 
the bad humors, the flighty fancies, the wild excesses, the 
morbid tendencies of literature. It mixes the practical 
lessons of experience with ideal truth. I know there is an 
ideal to which the poet must go for his law, and not to his 
own times and society. He must descend into his time as 
a minister of beauty and teacher of truth, who has been 
in to look at the invisible, and listen to the voice of the 
Eternal. He is to bring down into life what he does not 
find in it. He is to adjust his compass and lay his course 
by celestial observations. Dark will be the day when the 
poets and thinkers and teachers of the world surrender 
to the actual, and know no law but experience. Dismal 
enough is that invasion of realism which in art, in poetry, 
in fiction, is one of the worst distempers. When the ideal 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 325 

departs, life expires. But they need to keep hold of the 
solid facts of life, to steady, to correct, to orient them- 
selves by. The aeronaut in the far atmosphere is still 
held by the law of gravitation, and must depend on that 
to brinof him back from his high visions. The scholar 
must temper study with some part in affairs. Scholar- 
ship needs to be balanced by some knowledge of the world. 
It becomes very dry and dusty when it retreats into the 
world of books, and forgets that there is a great world 
outside of the libraries where the very life is still going 
on which it is studying after it has been preserved and 
embalmed in literature. The new studies are giving 
Greek a hard fight to hold its place, its traditional and 
proper place, in the college course. It will not win unless 
it can show that it belongs to a practical as well as a 
scholastic education. The Greek literature is such a part 
of the world's thought and speech as cannot be spared, as 
would be an irreparable loss to liberal education, to that 
•' complete and generous education" which, as Milton 
says, " fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and mag- 
nanimously all the offices, both private and public, of 
peace and war." It is because there is still life and im- 
mortal youth in the languages we call dead, that they are 
and are to be the study, not of antiquarians, but of all 
scholars who hope to take hold of the living world. 

And so it is life which is not only curative, but preserv- 
ative, and really gives literature its immortality. There 
is some vitality in it by which it survives the doom of 
decay which falls upon man and his books. Lost liter- 
ature enough there is, which has gone down into Lethe 
and devouring time. It perished, not so much for lack of 
types to preserve it, but because it had no hold on men's 
love and memory. Long ages before the invention of 
printing, it was said that of the making of books there is 
no end. But. it is not the constant making, but the con- 
stant mortality of books, which is most suggestive. They 



326 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

dropped out of the memory because tliey dropped out of 
the life of men. They perished because their use was 
transient, and the life in them was small and brief. They 
died simply because they had nothing in them to keep 
them alive, to fasten them to the perpetuated thought and 
life of mankind. They could not keep pace with the new 
thoughts, the new life of the world, and so fell back and 
were lost. The secret of the longevity of the Hebrew 
Scriptures, of the best classics, of the literature which 
every generation reads, is in something more than their 
style, or even their matter. It is the universal human 
element in them, which comes home to men everywhere 
and always. It is life in them, human life, which never 
wearies, which always delights ; it is that touch of nature 
which makes nations kin, and all the ages one ; it is the 
life of great souls, which have not only been imbued with 
the Zeitgeist of a single age or country, but have drunk 
into the life of humanity, and have known how to put that 
life into words, into the language of their time, by which 
it has become the language of all time. It is the key 
which Ben Jon son gave to the immortality of Shake- 
speare, — 

" And for his poesy, 't is so rammed with Hfe, 
That it shall gather strength with being, 
And live hereafter more admired than now." 

And when Jesus said, " The words that I speak unto 
you, they are spirit, and they are life," he explained the 
immortal freshness and power of the Gospel. It is truth 
married to life, it is living truth married to living words, 
it is literature born out of life and into life, which sur- 
vives every other work of man, and has a vitality which 
belongs not to forms and letters, but to a spiritual essence. 

This is the hour of scholars, when a company of them, 
in many departments, take the honors of the University 
and go their way. They have been students, and, please 
God, let them be students still. They have been trained 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 327 

to scholarship, of one kind and another ; let it find its mis- 
sion. For it remains to you not only to find its increase, 
but to find its use. Here is life, and jou carry into it 
what it greatly needs. Here is truth, and you have not 
learned all of it yet. Think not that possibility in either 
is concluded ; that literature has all been written, that life 
with its great opportunities is exhausted. The last word 
has not been said, the best deed has not been done. There 
is yet truth, there is yet life, great, rich, untried. They 
wait for your coming. Be it yours to use what you have 
learned, and to turn truth into life. Always may this 
great University stand, with doors opening both ways, — in- 
ward toward all truth, known or unknown ; outward to- 
ward life, and the wants of the world. Always in her 
training may the reconciliation be made between thought 
and action, letters and life. She sends forth her children, 
not as literary dilettanti, — 

" To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, 
Or with the tangles of Nesera's hair ; " 

not to be mere critics while others do the work of the 
world ; not to be theorists only, who tell how it is to be 
done, — but as serious scholars, who learn that they may 
teach ; w^ho study into the best things, that the best things 
may be done ; who join good learning and useful living ; 
who will increase the debt the country owes her scholars, 
and repay the debt which literature owes to life. 



CHEISTIANITY AND THE BODY.i 

The body, by some inevitable law of things, seems to 
take a large share of human life. Man is always an ani- 
mal, whatever else and better he may be. His foundation 
is in the dust, where his earthly existence begins and ends, 
and finds its necessary subsistence. He is a physical 
creature, his life rooted in a material world. To lodge, to 
feed, to clothe, to transport, to heal the body, takes more 
time, more force, costs more than anything else. It takes 
a third of every day, a third of all human life for sleep, 
simply to repair its natural and constant waste. Civili- 
zation in its industries, its commerce, its legislations, its 
inventions, in almost all its business, is taking care of the 
body. To heal its diseases requires one of the most 
learned and laborious professions. To build houses and 
roads for it, to set its table, to keep it covered and to keep 
it warm, employs the largest part of the labor, if not of 
the intelligence, of mankind. 

And more than that, the multiplied Providential ar- 
rangements, all things in heaven and earth, the coming 
and going of the sun and the seasons, the distribution of 
heat and moisture, the climates and soils, not the harvests 
only which feed great nations, but the luxuries which 
please the palate and the smell, the fine vicissitudes of 
color which delight the eye, the endless harmonies which 
charm the ear, all these vast contributions of nature to hu- 
man senses and appetites, tell of the Creator's care for the 
body. No man takes so much pains and care for himself 

1 Read at the Second Annual Baptist Autumnal Conference in 
Boston, November 13, 1883. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE BODY. 329 

as nature, as its and his Almighty Maker does for him, 
and for his body, which at best lasts only threescore years 
and ten. 

And more than that ; consider the expenditure of force, 
intellectual and moral, in using it, even in subduing it, in 
taming its passions, in controlling its energies, in bearing 
its infirmities. Without its senses the mind is locked up 
in an impenetrable box, and has no development. With 
it the mind has an alert servant, a potent instrument, by 
which the whole face of the earth is transformed. There 
is no force of nature, no power in the other creatures, equal 
to it. The human hand has wrought the wonders of the 
world ; it has built the temples of religion ; it makes 
lenses and scalpels, a needle and a locomotive ; it steers 
the plow and the ship ; it performs the gentlest and the 
mightiest tasks ; it has fashioned all the conveniences of 
civilized life ; it has executed the laws of intelligence in 
all the physical life of man. When we count the debt of 
the world to mind, we must count also the debt of the 
mind to the body, without which in a world like this it 
would be impotent. Thought is a power, but what is it 
without the pen and the type ? Ideas are mighty, but 
they must have the voice of the orator, even the cannon 
of armies. It is the soldier's sword, the workman's tool, 
the printer's type ; it is the thinker's thought put into 
act ; it is the soul finding communication through words, 
through deeds ; it is physical forces obeying the law and 
idea of the mind, which rule the world. Without the 
body they would be dreams of the night, impalpable and 
powerless. 

And so it happens, or rather so it is in the very nature 
of things, that every science has to take the body into 
account. Psychology cannot escape it, but has to answer 
the questions of materialism, and validate the soul's know- 
ledge of what is so unlike it as the material world. Ethics 
crosses at all points questions which belong to man's phys- 



330 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

ieal nature and estate. The tenure of land, the wages of 
labor, the relations of capital, the regulation or suppres- 
sion of sensual evils, are the vexed and flagrant questions 
with which sociology has to deal, and they all belong to 
man's physical life. And so it can hardly be that reli- 
gion, even in its most spiritual type, can keep itself out of 
relationship with the body. 

If it is a religion from God, it is a religion for man, 
and therefore must take him as it finds him, a soul in a 
body, the spiritual life always in a physical envelope. This 
is the presumption for Christianity, that it at least under- 
stands human nature, and will come to man as he is, not 
yet out of the body. It would go wide of the mark if it 
were a religion for pure spirits, and did not recognize 
man's actual nature and life. Its contention with mate- 
rialism is not against the body, but in behalf of the soul. 
In fact, it is hard to see how it could touch the soul with 
redemptive power and not affect that physical life in which 
the soul acts. It could not nicely divide between man's 
twofold nature, reaching the greater and not the less. 
The intelligence cannot escape the influence of its puri- 
fied affections ; and the body cannot remain unaffected by 
a rectified will. The moral energy of Christianity must go 
into the physical life of nations. Such a religion cannot 
go on a straight line from the cross of Calvary to the New 
Jerusalem, snatching and carrying along such souls as it 
can by the way, without leavening their earthly life. The 
notion of an atomic, individual religion, with no organic 
development and no social work, flees, or ought to flee, 
out of men's minds. The notion of a religion which in its 
spirituality avoids the secular, and even the physical, as 
out of its domain, does not belong to living and practical 
and victorious Christianity. 

It is significant that the inchoate, germinal religion out 
of which Christianity emerged made so much of the body. 
Its worship required at least a clean person, and its pre- 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE BODY. 331 

scriptions about dresses and ablutions, about separations 
and contacts, about postures and acts, were minute and 
rigid, whatever symbolic significance tbey may have had. 
In the institutes of Moses, sanitary regulations were reli- 
gious, and provisions against physical defilement had the 
force of moral law. His legislation mingled the religious 
and the secular, the care of the body and the worship of 
God ; while all the promises of the Mosaic covenant 
joined the possession of the land and length of days, the 
subsistence and continuance of the body, with obedience 
to Jehovah. The Levitical religion was a ritualism, what- 
ever lay behind it, and so far was of the body ; as the 
Epistle to the Hebrews says " which stood only in meats 
and drinks and divers washings and carnal ordinances 
imposed on them until the time of reformation^ ^ 

The time of reformation arrived, and the new reli- 
gion was one of the spirit. Its worship was not local ; 
its Church was not national ; its God was invisible. Its 
first requirement was faith ; its first agency was, not even 
the written word, but the invisible Spirit of Truth. It 
made no requirement of outward cleanliness, hardly of 
outward observance, but of truth and penitence and love 
in the inward parts. If Christianity had any distinction 
as against the old religion, against all religions, it was 
as a dispensation of the Spirit, and on this account was 
" rather glorious." But with spirituality for its one and 
specific note, there are some significant facts which link it 
to the body. 

First, there is the doctrine of Incarnation, which Chris- 
tian thought more and more brings to the centre, and 
which makes humanity, even the human body, the sacred 
tabernacle of the Redeeming Lord. " Forasmuch as the 
children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also him- 
self took part of the same."^ He came into the line of 
himian generations, into the physical life of the race. He 
1 Heb. ix. 10. 2 Heb. ii. 14. 



332 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

was not a docetic phantasm, a transient theophany, but a 
real man, hungry, sleeping, weary with his journey, work- 
ing at his trade, succumbing to death at last. The Word 
made flesh is such consecration of the human body as 
God, not disdaining but dwelling in it, can give. 

Again, the notable thing about the ministry of our Lord 
was, that it was so much a ministry to men's bodies, as 
well as their souls. He was poor, and could do little for 
their physical comfort, except in a miraculous way. And 
so he recognized their bodily necessities and fed them 
when hungry. How many persons he cured of disease 
probably the gospels do not tell, and yet they relate a 
great number of striking instances, and then state in a 
general way that " he went about all the cities and villages, 
healing every sickness and every disease among the peo- 
ple ; " 1 while he also " gave his apostles power to heal all 
manner of sickness and all manner of disease." ^ And so 
he consecrated even the infirm, diseased, mortal body by 
devoting to it so much of his ministry as a Prophet and 
Evangelist of God. 

The death of Christ, on which redemption hangs, has 
a significance and efficacy entirely spiritual, and has no 
other value than a moral one ; and yet it was a physical 
event, — the death and burial and resurrection of the body 
of our Lord, — on which all this great act of redemption 
turned, and thus stands as twin and complement to the 
Licarnation in its testimony to the consecration which our 
Lord gave to the human body. 

Again, this spiritual religion has two sacraments sym- 
bolizing its essential ideas, and both of them belong to 
the body, — first to its cleansing, and second to its nutri- 
ment. It is water washing it, it is bread and wine, it is 
eating and drinking ; it is not the physical only, but the 
corporeal, which is sanctified to this sacramental purpose. 

And then, if this corruptible is to put on incorrup- 
1 Matt. ix. 35. ^ /^/^.^ x. 1. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE BODY. 333 

tion, if out of the present is to rise the future and immor- 
tal life, the Christian doctrine of Resurrection means at 
least as much as this, — that there is a connection not 
only between the life, but also the body which now is and 
that which is to come. It is not pure and naked spirit 
here ; it will be no more pure and naked spirit hereafter. 
And whatever future organization the soul shall assume 
after the dissolution of this mortal, it has some mysterious 
and undiscoverable connection with that which is to be 
immortal. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of 
God. But that the soul's inheritance, that which it car- 
ries with it into the future life, is entirely moral, no germ 
of its future abode in the present, life all begun over 
again, depletes the doctrine of a resurrection of all mean- 
ing. That Christianity creating a new spiritual life, and 
careful first of all for that, in its ethics deals with the 
body, and after a divine wisdom of its own, only follows 
logically what has already been said. It came into a 
world where two tendencies were at work, and the pendu- 
lum swung to two extremes. The two tendencies met 
even in religion itself. The one indulged the body ; the 
other despised and mortified it. The one was sensuous, 
the other ascetic. The one made much of this world and 
the physical life ; the other sacrificed it for the sake of 
another. The one was unbalanced materialism : the other 
was unbalanced spiritualism. 

And so we find Christianity yielding now to one and 
now to the other, and even combining the two. For 
while it soon put on a gay and magnificent ritualism to 
please the senses and captivate minds trained in the shows 
of Paganism, it at the same time admitted the Manichean 
and Gnostic heresies, which considered matter essentially 
evil, and made the suj)pression of all bodily desires, the 
mortification of the flesh, even the torture and disfigure- 
ment of the body,^ a peculiar virtue. Asceticism began 

^ For an interesting statement in regard to the influence of this 
feeUng upon art, see Lecky, History of Rationalism, i. 239. 



334 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

early in Christian history, issuing in monastic austerities, 
and has always infected the Christian life. It is false in 
principle and corrupting in its effects. Its ideal of sanc- 
tity is the suppression of the bodily appetites instead of 
their control. In the interest of spirituality, for the sake 
of the soul, it crucifies what Christian principle is abun- 
dantly able to govern. It honors celibacy, even compels 
it ; it prescribes the fasting which is ritual instead of that 
which may be necessary or useful ; it makes temperance a 
sin, and abstinence the only virtue ; to use the very words 
of St. Paul, in whose time it had already begun to work, 
" forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from 
meats, which God hath created to be received with thanks- 
giving of them which believe and know the truth." Let 
me continue the quotation, which in a word passes final 
sentence on all ascetic practices, and states the true rela- 
tion of religion to physical enjoyment : " For every crea- 
ture of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be 
received with thanksgiving : for it is sanctified by the 
word of God and prayer." ^ 

Christianity has this problem and ideal in the future, to 
reconcile the spiritual and the physical ; to maintain the 
primacy of the soul, and yet give the body its full devel- 
opment ; to keep the two poles of life, the religious and 
the secular, in equipoise ; to be the friend of all art, of 
all beauty, of all joy, and yet the mother of all righteous- 
ness, and the nurse of the loftiest spiritual life. It is to 
uphold the rights of man's spiritual nature, with and not 
against the growth of physical science to the last border 
of material existence. Against a religion of animal pas- 
sion or of carnal ordinance ; against an unmixed mate- 
rialism and a civilization that is of the flesh ; against the 
sensualities, coarse or fine, which devour so many souls, — 
it is to stand for temperance in all physical pleasures, for 
spirituality, for the supremacy of conscience, for sincere 
1 1 Tim. iv. 3-5. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE BODY. 335 

and simple religious observance, for spiritual interests as 
paramount and everlasting. But so, also, is it to bring 
together in the unity of life the body and the soul under 
a common and holier consecration, that the body may be a 
temple of the Holy Ghost. It is to be the healer of man's 
physical disorders as well as his redeemer from sin. It 
is to spiritualize art and not destroy it ; to enlarge the 
commodity and culture of life without lowering its aim or 
reducing its faith. It is to have its part in the improve- 
ment of man's present estate, as well as in the redemption 
of his immortal life. 

The Pagan poet, Juvenal, put as a desire and a prayer 
into his often-repeated line, — 

" Orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano," 

what the Christian apostle puts into a precept and a doc- 
trine, — " Glorify God in your body and in your spirit, 
which are God's." 

" Then eomes the statelier Eden back to men ; 
Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm ; 
Then springs the crowning race of human kind ; " ^ 

then comes a nobler breed of men, whose better blood 
shall match their purer morals, and who shall be physi- 
cally competent for the great calls of a purer and more 
spiritual religion, for the future needs and opportunities 
and triumphs of the coming kingdom of God. 

1 The Princess, p. 398. 



THE SUPEEMACY OF LOVE.i 

" And though I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and 
have not charity, I am nothing." — 1 Corinthians xiii. 2. 

That the Church in Corinth had many faults is plain 
from this letter. That it was also well endowed with the 
peculiar powers which came with the first inspirations of 
Christianity in the Apostolic age, is expressly declared by 
St. Paul. He was thankful that in everything they were 
enriched by Christ in all utterance and all knowledge, so 
that they came behind in no gift. Through this letter 
you look in upon a scene of great intellectual and spirit- 
ual activity. You feel the mighty yet excited and irreg- 
ular stir of a new spirit moving among men. You see the 
bright, quick wit of the Greek kindled into wildest activ- 
ity by fire from heaven. The new wine ferments. The 
spirit in them is eager and tumultuous. And so, enriched 
with so many gifts, they hardly know how to use them. 
They use them ambitiously and at random, — for pride 
rather than for common edification. They put the first 
last, the showy before the useful, gifts before graces. 

The Apostle rejoiced in all these signs of a new inspira- 
tion. These novel and remarkable gifts he does not dis- 
parage. They are good, they are useful. But, he says, 
there is something better. Best of all gifts is Charity ; 
not that merely of liberality in opinion or in alms, but 
Love, the deep, divine affection born of God and ending 
in God, which expands beyond into religion, which is love 
of God and man together. 

And so for a chapter this Apostle of faith becomes the 
^ Baccalaureate Sermon at Vassar College, June 22, 1879. 



THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE. 337 

inspired poet and psalmist of love, — exalts it, as the rest 
do, to the throne, and crowns it king. His epistle becomes 
lyric, a hymn rather than an argument, suffused with the 
charm of love, while it speaks its praise. He draws out 
its excellence into many particulars. He sets it in sharp 
contrasts. He lifts it into universal superiority. Benefi- 
cence, utterance, knowledge, faith, hope, are not enough, 
are nothing without love. 

This text separates for us knowledge as the gift to be 
compared with love. It takes the strong ground that, 
without that, all knowledge is nothing. It is very bold 
ground to take, here in the face of a college, before all 
these endowments for liberal education, to you who have 
given four years to this very thing. And yet it seems 
laid upon us, as if by commandment, to say it in an age 
of enlarging knowledge, when it ministers to a perilous 
pride, when the temptation is to sacrifice everything to in- 
tellectual equipment and conquest, when Christianity is 
pushed back as unilluminated and outgrown by science 
and a headstrong civilization. On the doorposts of li- 
braries and universities let this doctrine be written. Let 
teachers teach, let scholars learn, that, while all gifts are 
excellent, that while knowledge leads to truth, to power, 
there is a more excellent way; that it is love which leads 
to God, into the everlasting kingdom, the everlasting life. 
Even religion itself may suffer from the inverted order, 
and Christianity never get beyond her head. The mind 
may be exercised on its truths, while her heart disowns 
them. They may be clear to her intellect, and dead to the 
soul. And to hold these momentous revelations of God 
and Redemption congealed in a speculative head, un- 
touched by the heart's warm blood, kills instead of mak- 
ing alive. Theology without religion, without charity, is 
as unprofitable, as undivine, as any science can be. All 
knowledge, be it of matter or mind, of nature or God, 
I understand the Apostle to put into inferiority to Love, 

22 



338 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

this royal lord of life, this capital glory of God him- 
self. 

And yet it needs to be said in the beginning that there 
is no necessary strife between them. There is no real con- 
flict between Religion and Science, however busy some 
people make themselves in trying to reconcile the two ; to 
say nothing of other busy people who foment a quarrel. 
Faith and knowledge are not natural enemies, and ought 
to be allies. We may believe more than we know. We can- 
not believe against what we know. Conflicts there have 
been and are, some still flagrant, between the speculations 
of scientific men and the convictions of religious men. 
But between the facts of science and the facts of religion 
there can be no opposition. Both exist in the same cos- 
mos, as matter and mind do, unlike and yet not inconsist- 
ent. There may be no special relation between them, — be- 
tween the Principia of Newton and the first chapter of the 
Gospel of John, between the geologic structure of the 
globe and the prayer of the publican, — but there is no con- 
tradiction. And if there need be no conflict between 
faith and knowledge, surely it is possible for learning 
and loye to dwell together in the same heart. In many 
bright instances, — in a Pascal, a Leibnitz, a Faraday, — 
the happy marriage has been consummated. 

" Piety has found 
Friends in the friends of science, and true prayer 
Has flowed from lips wet with Castalian dews." 

The soul thirsting for the knowledge of all things may 
also thirst after God. You may bring your sins to Christ 
and learn of him the way of peace, the secret of immortal 
life, while also you are studious of God's handwriting, in 
matter or in mind, in the composition of a gas, or the for- 
mation of a language. The exercise of the affections 
need not weaken the intellect. While you knock at the 
doors of all mystery, why shall not the heart go up in 
prayer into the unseen place where Christ has gone before 



THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE. 339 

lis and for us ? The humility of a penitent heart need 
not abate intellectual aspirations and satisfactions. Com- 
munion with God, bearing the yoke of Christ, a spiritual 
mind, shuts no door of inquiry. Neither does study, ac- 
quisition, the hardest discipline, the fairest culture, even 
high intellectual ambition, chill any pious affection, or 
necessarily contract our faith. The two have been di- 
vorced, but not on account of any natural or necessary 
repugnance. They have been married, and to the advan- 
tage of both. Religion has taken breadth and largeness 
and even depth from culture, while it has given to intel- 
lectual pursuits their stimulus and sanctifying charm. Per- 
fection lies not in intellectual attainments or in spiritual 
graces, but in the combination of the two, and in the 
mutual cooperations and reactions of intellectual and 
spiritual power. 

And now, to go on, I may say that Love is the true min- 
ister of Knowledge. The heart and the mind, the intel- 
lect and the feelings, — to adopt the current division of 
the faculties, — are not only vitally joined in the spiritual 
organism, but so joined that they touch and quicken each 
other ; that intellectual improvement, especially intellec- 
tual creation or discovery, depends very much on the state 
of the affections. As it is in religious knowledge, in 
understanding the Scriptures, in apprehending spiritual 
truth, that progress depends on the moral temper ; that, 
as Jesus expressly said, doing the will of God leads to 
knowledge of his doctrine ; that, as St. Paul said, spirit- 
ual things are spiritually discerned, — so it is equally in 
other regions of thought, in all knowledge. The capacity 
for truth, for discerning, receiving, comprehending it, de- 
pends very much on temper and general tone of the mind, 
on the purity and freshness of our sensibilities, on our at- 
titude towards its Author, our nearness and likeness to 
Him. God resisteth the proud, and shuts the door against 
him. " The scorner seeketh wisdom and findeth it not," is 



340 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

the proverb of a very ancient time. And great philoso- 
phers have said that one enters the kingdom of know- 
ledge as he enters the kingdom of heaven, — like a little 
child. It is in humility, in reverence, in love to God 
and his creatures, that we question Nature, and hear or 
understand her response. The secret of the Lord, and the 
secret of his works as well, is with them that fear Him. 
Increased knowledge, so also increase of intellectual life, 
of its deeper impulses and inspirations, comes as the mind 
gets nearer its birthplace, and dwells with God in love. 
It is touched by forces from invisible realms. It feels the 
power, it partakes the grandeur, it is strengthened by the 
communion of that Eternal Love where it has its delighted 
home. To pray well was Luther's sign of a good student. 
He who dwells in God's light, how shall he not, if he seek, 
dwell in all light, and, as his heart opens to love, so also 
his intelligence open to truth, and by such nutriment both 
grow together? Of course there is knowledge, intellec- 
tual power, and progress possible without this divine affec- 
tion. Too often has genius cast off the yoke even of vir- 
tue, and disavowed the lordship of Christ, and gone sound- 
ing on its dim and perilous way alone. Everywhere we 
see it, men of great attainments and accomplishments, and 
certain intellectual success, without religious faith. But 
surely this would not have disarmed them of any power, 
rather would have anchored their restless spirits, and have 
supplied what is now a marked and in any large view of 
life a fatal defect. It would have touched their genius 
with permanent rather than transient and superficial in- 
spirations. For love, humble, adoring, trustful, generous 
love, is not only the spirit of the noblest study, and the 
right temper for intellectual growth, but it supplies the 
motives, the stimulus, the direction, the large conditions, 
the temperate climate, the healthful atmosphere of thought 
and intellectual life. Our ambitions die, our powers decay, 
but love never faileth. Selfishness seeks knowledge for ad- 



THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE. 341 

vantage or for eminence, at best for curiosity or for orna- 
ment ; but love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the 
trutli.i When the love of knowledge weakens, when evil 
passions get the better of it, when our indolence, our sensu- 
alities, our low aims, our bad companionships, or our secret 
depravities, hang chains of iron upon the soul, to sink the 
whole nature, the intellectual and the spiritual together, 
then comes love, the love of Christ, — his to us, ours grate- 
ful and responsive to Him, — to lift us up and divinely con- 
strain us. With a right heart, won from all false and 
wrong things, drawn to God by supreme attraction, all 
else comes right, — labor, disappointment, failure, for love 
endureth all things ; success, satisfaction, honor, for love 
vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Love works spirit- 
ual wonders. And if it cannot supply intellectual power 
where it is wanting, it puts what there is to the best use : 
the aimlessness, the wastefulness, the bad economy of 
minds having no regulating principle, is avoided where 
religious faith and spiritual consecration govern. Love 
cannot take the place of knowledge, but it can minister to 
it and work with it, and even protect against it. 

For knowledge without love is a perilous gift, not only 
more difficult in attainment, but more dangerous in pos- 

^ " But the greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplac- 
ing of the last or furthest end of knowledge : for men have entered 
into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural 
curiosity and inquisitive appetite ; sometimes to entertain their minds 
with variety and delight ; sometimes for ornament and reputation ; 
and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction ; 
and most times for lucre and profession ; and seldom sincerely to give 
a true account of their gift of reason to the benefit and use of men : 
as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a 
searching and restless spirit ; or a tarrasse, for a wandering and vari- 
able mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect ; or a tower of 
state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon ; or a fort or commanding 
ground, for strife and contention ; or a shop, for profit or sale ; and 
not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of 
man's estate." — Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book I. 



342 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

session. We often have the sad sight that it is no sufficient 
security. Literary history is dark throughout with in- 
stances of genius wrecked all the easier and surer because 
it is genius, without a moral anchorage, consumed in its 
own unhallowed fire. Knowledge is not wisdom. 

" Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain, — 
She cannot fight the fear of death. 
What is she, cut from love and faith, 
But some wild Pallas from the brain 

"Of demons ? fiery hot to burst 
All barriers in her onward race 
For power. Let her know her place : 
She is the second, not the first." 

Learning is not mighty against meanness and self-in- 
dulgence. Cultivation does not change the heart, cannot 
rectify the spirit before God, or carry it through the judg- 
ments of death and the world beyond. There is no real 
salvation in knowledge, even though you understand all 
mysteries : though you know Christ after the flesh, and 
God after theology, and duty after the Scriptures ; though 
you have all knowledge, even of things revealed and reli- 
gious, and have not love, — there is a central and fatal de- 
fect. Character does not lie in the strong head, in the 
clear brain, but in the true heart which rules life, and 
under God fixes our destiny. 

Indeed, love is the only security of knowledge and of 
its right use, without which it is dangerous. For like all 
gifts, perhaps more than all gifts, unregulated by religious 
faith and pious love, it is a temptation and a snare. 
Knowledge puffeth up, love lifteth up. Love vaunteth 
not itself, doth not behave itself unseemly ; but too much 
learning unconsecrated makes mad. It has been by wis- 
dom, the conceit of it, by knowledge without faith, by 
philosophy without humility, that the world knew not God. 
For this is the temptation of an active brain, this is the 
tendency of an age of intellectual activity and conquest, 



THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE. 348 

when knowledge is sought as an end. The mind runs to 
pride and an unhealthy independence. It must have reli- 
gion taking hold of the Eternal to balance it, to settle its 
ferments, to govern its wild forces. The most subtle temp- 
tations often beset and carry captive the mind eager for 
knowledge, and strong in intellectual predominance. It is 
not the grossness of appetites so much as the conceits of 
pride, the vanity of knowing more than Christ, the rebel- 
lions of the heart against his teaching and rule, which be- 
tray the brightest spirits to their enemy. And then it is 
not intellectual culture always which overcomes coarse- 
ness and baseness. The lower nature is set on fire with a 
flame which knowledge can never extinguish. There have 
been instances of profligacy, of mean actions, of crime 
even to uncleanness and to blood, connected with scientific 
discovery and intellectual accomplishment. 

" Hold thou the good ; define it well : 
For fear divine Philosophy- 
Should push beyond her mark, and be 
Procuress to the lords of hell." 

It is by love, and not by knowledge, that we gain the 
true ends of life. For knowledge is only means to an 
end, and the end of all knowledge and of all things is our 
perfection. And love is that perfection. Knowledge 
brings neither peace nor purity. It is written from the 
beginning that he that increaseth knowledge increaseth 
sorrow. The sharpest pangs are in the most cultured 
souls. The joy of what we know is never so great as the 
burden of what is left unknown. Knowledge conquers 
no sin : it plucks no rooted sorrow from the heart. There 
is no balm, no medicine in it ; no secret of the eternal 
peace, of the divine health. Without love, satisfied with 
God's promise, partaking of his forgiveness, patient under 
his discipline, much study is a weariness to the flesh and 
a perplexity to the spirit. Forever rises up that which no 
knowledge satisfies, a heart vexed with trouble, restless in 



344 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

its sin, anticipating immortality, and it says, What is all 
this worth ? That I know gives me no relief. There is a 
joy in new visions of truth, a triumph in intellectual su- 
premacy, a help in knowledge. But there is still an end 
unfulfilled ; a joy, a triumph, a help not gained. I may 
understand all mysteries, I may search out God's sublime 
geometry in matter, or follow him on dark or shining 
paths in the mind and history of man. I may search the 
Scriptures to find there God's revelations of himself, of his 
purposes, of his proceedings, of my own life and its great 
issues. Christianity shall unfold itself to my thought. 
But then what shall I do ? I have no friendship, no inter- 
course with this God of my spirit. Knowledge of the di- 
vine remedy has not healed my hurt, nor lifted the burden 
of sin from my conscience. A gulf yawns between me 
and the divine love. I see in Christ, and yet do not feel, 
and cannot know because of a still alienated heart. My 
soul wants something to fasten to in reverence and joy, 
and does not find it. And it is not till you have learned 
the simple lesson, hid from the wise and prudent, that the 
way into peace, into the highest knowledge, is through 
love, which counts all things but loss for the excellency 
of the knowledge of Christ, that the end of all knowledge, 
of all life, is reached. 

For after all, without love coming through the recon- 
ciliations of the cross, without a heart resting in God 
in peace and delight, the more we know, the farther we 
search, if we cannot feel our footing sure in some reality 
which will last the world through, and eternity through, 
the more mysterious and dreary existence becomes. And 
above all, when we are through, when from all we have 
known we are going away into the unknown and see no 
inch beyond, when no more of life is left and knowledge 
fails us, it is only faith turned into love, looking through 
the dark into God's promise and very face of love, — it is 
then we feel that not knowledge but love is the pilot which 



THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE. 345 

sees far into the darkness, and will keep us where sight 
fails, and no darkness of the unknown can put out that 
light. 

For this is just what St. Paul says, as the last thing 
to be said, that, while love never faileth, knowledge shall 
vanish away. One is transient, the other immortal. In a 
large and general view, see the change which has passed 
upon the world's knowledge. Where is the science of 
Paul's day ? Their geography is outgrown, their astron- 
omy superseded or revolutionized, their philosophy of mat- 
ter, and even of mind, of small account. The world 
laughs over the things they thought certain, and studies 
their literature with antiquarian curiosity rather than for 
living truth. Christ and Him crucified proved to be the 
one thino' then worth knowins: which has not become 
worthless and obsolete with the lapse of time. 

Whether there be tongues, they shall cease. The very 
languages of the ancients, in which the Scriptures them- 
selves are preserved, are dead, as we call them, and half 
the curriculum of the college is spent in relearning them. 
And knowledge is as temporary as language, and shall 
vanish away. Science, in its inevitable progress, is con- 
tinually shifting its ground. It ought to make us modest 
and humble about what we learn, if not more confident 
about what we believe. It ought to compose our fears of 
any final disappearance of Christianity before advancing 
civilization, and our alarms at the threats of those who 
have discovered substitutes for it ; who think by scientific 
researches that religion may be discovered out of life, and 
God out of existence. 

There is a work translated out of the German of Feuer- 
bach called " The Essence of Christianity," which proba- 
bly you never read, and which it would do you little good 
to read. It is the ultimate conclusion of that great 
scheme of Hegelian philosophy which so absorbed German 
speculation for a considerable part of this century. It is 



346 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

an attempt to give a philosophical basis to atheism, and to 
show that religion is a thing outgrown, and must shortly 
disappear out of the world. Not long ago I spent a few 
days in the quaint old city of Nuremberg, and more than 
once went to the old churchyard of St. John's, outside the 
walls, drawn there in part by the tomb of Albert Diirer, with 
its inscription, Emigravit^ telling his faith in another life.^ 
At the close of a lovely Sunday afternoon in autumn I 
was there, and found a large concourse of people gathered 
at the burial of this famous Feuerbach, whom the orators 
of the occasion described as " the greatest thinker of the 
nineteenth century.'' Near sunset the crowd dispersed, 
and, in the words of " Gray's Elegy " in a similar place, 
"left the world to darkness and to me." I could but 
think of Diirer sleeping there in the same ground, now for 
two hundred and fifty years. His character and his art 
were founded on a profound faith in the realities of a 
spiritual world. He wrought nobly and sincerely in this 
world because he felt that he was citizen of another and 
higher, to which he was to emigrate. He wrought with a 
result solid and vital, and which glorifies Nuremberg to- 

^ The inscription is as follows : — 

ME. AL. DV. 

QUICQUID ALBERTI 

DURERI MORTALE 

FUIT SUB 

HOC CONDITUR 

TUMULO EMIGRAVIT. 

VIII. IDUS APRILIS 

M. D. XXVIII. 

A 

D 

Mr. Longfellow's verses may be added : — 
" Here, where Art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart, 
Lived and labored Albrecht Diirer, the Evangelist of Art ; 

Hence in silence and in sorrow, toiling still with busy hand, 
Like an emigrant he wandered, seeking for the Better Land. 
Efnigravit is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies ; 
Dead he is not, but departed, — for the artist never dies." 



THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE. 347 

day, because he believed what Feuerbach*denied. And I 
said, if this is the last outcome and highest thought of the 
nineteenth century, and Feuerbach has said the last and 
best word it has to utter, let us go back three centuries to 
Albert Diirer. Be sure of this, that no great art, no 
solid and durable thing, ever sprung out of the creed of 
Feuerbach. There may be great knowledge, great philos- 
ophy which destroys, but it is faith, it is love which cre- 
ates, which endures, which is I'emembered here, and has 
an inheritance elsewhere. 

The vanishing and disappearing of knowledge belongs 
to the very nature of life as progressive. The Apostle 
compares it to the childish things which man leaves be- 
hind as he passes from infancy. So is all our life, here 
and hereafter. The knowledge which is sufficient for one 
stage is not for another, — in fact disappears and is lost in 
the increase of light. But love never faileth. 

What a dreary prospect for one who has only know^- 
ledge, in old age, in the inevitable decay which comes with 
increase of years ! Knowledge fades away, forgotten, and 
power goes. But love is within the heart, a secret and 
perpetual well-spring, a perennial source of beauty to the 
ripening life. Disaster cannot touch it. Trouble only 
increases it. And then in dying ! Knowledge, indeed, 
we may carry with us, our heritage for the future, our 
discij)line for celestial service. But how much of it may be 
useless, abandoned as only an incumbrance, or superseded 
and swallowed up, as stars go out in the brightness of the 
eternal day ! And all of it will be unavailing — that is, 
to any true need of your immortality — to meet its dread 
exigencies, its spiritual judgments, unless you can carry it 
with a heart made right, and ready to be made perfect in 
love. The vision of God, to see the King in his beauty, 
belongs only to love, to the pure in heart. Says that 
deep-hearted Christian, Frederick Eobertson : " I can 
conceive of no dying hour more awful than that of one who 



348 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

has aspired to hnow instead of to love^ and finds himself at 
last amidst a world of barren fact and lifeless theories, lov- 
ing none and adoring nothing." Love never fails, but even 
when the narrow life here stops and the infinite future 
opens, and the great life of immortality begins, love is 
sufficient for that, and finds its true home and endless sat- 
isfaction there. 

What, now, have I undertaken ? To maintain, in the 
presence of a school established in the interest of good 
learning, a thesis which Paul states, on which Christianity 
stands ; namely, the superiority of the spiritual to the in- 
tellectual, of goodness to genius, of love to knowledge. 
I have shown that the two are not oppugnant, and may be 
united ; that love helps knowledge and quickens intellec- 
tual growth ; that knowledge needs the restraints as well 
as the inspirations of love ; that the end of life is not in 
what we know, but in what we love ; and, finally, that 
love is the one imperishable thing remaining when powers 
decay and life ends. 

And to what conclusion does this come ? Is it that 
knowledge is worthless, that study is to stop, and the col- 
lege to be closed? Is it to condemn education, and cast 
dishonor on our founder, and discourage the very work 
so many young and aspiring souls came here to do ? Is 
it that religion and science are enemies, and cannot be 
friends ? And, therefore, that inquiry must stop, and in 
the interest of religion science be shortened in its range 
and predetermined in its conclusions ? Kather it is that 
schools, that education, must be Christian ; that religion 
must have its place, as knowledge has its place ; that with 
a free, alert, acquisitive intellect, there must be fresh af- 
fections, and generous charity, and a devout spirit, and 
the consecrations and hopes of a life with God. 

To you, my friends, who out of this cloister of study 
are now going into the life of the world without, these 
words come for your advice and your benediction. It is 



THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE. 349 

for you to reconcile and join, in the life which now opens 
to you, these two, knowledge and love. This is not always 
easy, to keep the heart tender while knowledge grows ; to 
love God with a great, holy love ; to sympathize with all 
that is pure, good, humane, divine, with Christ's great love 
for man ; while remitting nothing in the love of study, of 
knowledge, in the privilege and the power and the progress, 
in the tastes and pursuits, which belong to you as educated 
women. Learn the danger there is on both sides ; espe- 
cially that you have a heart to keep with all diligence, 
because that out of it are the issues of life ; that meek- 
ness and reverence and charity must go with knowledge, 
or it is poisoned ; that no gifts, no acquisitions, can be 
wholly good or useful with a proud, selfish, restless heart. 
Covet all gifts ; intermeddle with all knowledge ; preserve 
the studiousness, the scholarly tastes, the comprehensive 
culture, which have begun here. But remember always 
that love is the most excellent of gifts, and the consecra- 
tion of them all ; that it is possible to win all intellectual 
prizes, and lose the soul ; that you may know much, all 
things, and yet be ignorant of that secret of the Lord 
which is the beginning of wisdom, which is the only eter- 
nal life. 



THE HEAVENLY VISION.i 

" Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the 
heavenly vision." — Acts xxvi. 19. 

Heee is a man who has a sudden vision, and for thirty 
years or more, to the very end of life, he follows it, and 
allows it to have supreme influence over him. In the pur- 
suit of it, under the impulse of it, he faces all peril, and 
denies himself all indulgence, and dies for it at last. Such 
a man is called a visionary, and to his reproach. He fol- 
lows the dreams of his mind rather than the sight of his 
eyes. He does not see what he thinks he sees. He sees 
visions, and dreams dreams, and takes them for facts. He 
lets his fancy, his imagination, his illusions, lead him, and 
gives the unreal, the imaginary, such power as belongs 
only to reality. Such a person may be amiable, but people 
pity him for his delusion, and let him pass. They, give 
him little heed, and say, like Joseph's brothers, " Behold 
this dreamer cometh." 

And indeed there is not much to be said for the mere 
dreamer. It is the infirmity of some minds that they fly 
so much in the air, and rarely touch the solid earth. They 
waste their power and accomplish little because they mis- 
take shadows for realities. Visionary speculations in 
philosophy, in business, unsettle men's heads, and come to 
little good. One purpose of your education here is to pre- 
vent or correct the mistakes into which fancy and dream- 
ing lead. I have to warn you against idle dreaming, if it 
takes the place of earnest action. 

And yet there are visions and visionaries which justl}^ 
^ Baccalaureate Sermon, at Vassar College, June 22, 1880. 



THE HEAVENLY VISION. 351 

bear no such reproach. There are visionaries who lead 
the world, and come to the end and height of their vision 
because they see so far, and believe in what they see. St. 
Paul was not disobedient to the heavenly vision which fell 
upon him, and that made a mighty difference in his life. 
That henceforth changed, empowered, immortalized him. 
From the touch of Ananias upon his blinded eyes at 
Damascus, even on to the stroke of the headsman's axe 
upon his neck at Rome, he kept seeing more and more in 
that vision, and it would not let him go, as he would not 
let it go. It was not the transient glimpse of a wonderful 
hour, but became the permanent force of every day. It 
inspired him, and gave him support. It realized itself to 
him as no dream of his fancy, but the supreme fact of 
existence. And without it, with all his genius and practi- 
cal energy, he would have failed. His life would have 
dropped down into tame conformity, and the most un- 
spiritual aim. It would have been emptied of the divine 
aspiration and uplifting faith by which he endured and 
conquered. 

Something, then, is to be said for visions, and it is my 
business to-daj^ to tell you how important it is that you 
should have them, and be true to them. Indeed, I want 
to speak of the relations of Vision and Action, and to tell 
you what you do in life will depend very much, and per- 
haps first of all, upon what you see. Obedience to the 
highest and best thing you see is the word for this parting- 
hour. 

Seeing the unseen, — this is the paradox of religion; 
this is the mystery of faith, as it is the perplexity of unbe- 
lief. But it is the very thing which divides men, and 
which is the crowning excellence of human nature. It is 
the first gift of religion, as it is the highest attainment of 
life. It is second sight, a clearer and farther vision, a 
longer and ampler range, an annexed realm of knowledge, 
that " precious seeing to the eye " which love adds, that 



352 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

seeing the invisible which belongs to faith, that vision of 
God which belongs not to mj'^stics only, but to all the pure 
in heart, that spiritual discernment, that finer sense, that 
inward illumination, tliat sympathetic and divine appre- 
hension of things unseen and eternal, which, if it belongs 
not to human nature, at least becomes its possession 
through spiritual renewal and the Christian faith. This 
Christianity asserts and imparts. This is the meaning 
of its doctrine of the Holy Ghost, written in its earliest 
creed, as it is on all the front of the New Testament. 
This was the last promise of Jesus before he went away : 
" Howbeit when he the Spirit of Truth is come, he will 
guide you into all truth, and he will show you things to 
come." This was the signal promise of old prophecy be- 
fore he came : " And it shall come to pass afterward that I 
will pour out my spirit upon all flesh ; and your sons and 
your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream 
dreams, your young men shall see visions." And the Pente- 
cost came, and Christianity started on its victorious career 
with a marvelous outbreak of spiritual light, with clearer 
vision as with many-tongued utterance of its new revela- 
tions of God. And its first great convert and mightiest 
apostle had his eyes opened to see Jesus when He had gone 
from the flesh, and even to see things which it is not law- 
ful because impossible for a man to utter. And it has 
been, and is, a conquering energy in the life of the world, 
because it reveals the hidden, and unveils the invisible ; 
because it opens the eyes to spiritual realities, and em- 
ploys for its weapons the powers of the world to come. 

It comes in our way, first, and most naturally for you 
who for a year have been studying the powers of the human 
mind, to see that there is such a faculty in man, that there 
is the power, actual or potential, which apprehends invis- 
ible things, which sees in things more than appears, which 
sees heyond things present and actual what is not of the 
senses, and not of man ; an idealizing power which creates 



THE HEAVENLY VISION. 353 

types of ideal character and visions of unknown beauty 
and good, and " moves about in worlds not realized," and 
so lifts the soul above itself into the invisible. There is 
the power which passes from the transient to the perma- 
nent, and, whether by knowledge or b}^ faith, lays hold of 
the essential, the spiritual, the everlasting. There is the 
ethical, the philosophical, the spiritual, as well as the 
poetic imagination, all of them the same power of the 
mind, which, in the realm of the possible, the unknown, the 
invisible, the future, discovers or creates, invents or im- 
agines, expects or believes, and so fills time and space, 
and the whole realm of being, with visions which are to 
it realities. There is the power of faith, wiiich, whether 
it be natural or supernatural, is the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. There is, in a 
word, the power of vision, not of the eye, which can reach 
to the mountain - to23 or the far Orion, but of the soul, 
which reaches to immortality and to God. There is " the 
vision and the faculty divine " which is the poet's, because 
all souls are poets, penetrating more or less the deep life 
of things, discerning God in the universe, a moral law in 
all life, a moral order in the world and its history, a spirit 
in man, and a sjDiritual world in which his immortality has 
root and certaintj^ There is above all, that Spirit of God 
whose illuminations are the light of the soul, whose teach- 
ings, whose movings, whose renewings, whose inward wit- 
ness, are the life of religion, are the source of all spiritual 
knowledge and power, of light to the vision and love to 
the heart. And back there at last we trace whatever 
power of faith, of spiritual vision, of knowing God and the 
things of God, of knowing sin in its evil and Christ in its 
cleansing, and the world to come in its terror or its splen- 
dor, whatever sight not j^rophets only have of the secrets 
of God, but which any of us have of the things which are 
hidden from, the eyes, and which a,re revealed from faith 
to faith. 

23 



354 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

Here it is, — the power, and the sphere into which it 
looks ; the vast world of visions ; the things to be seen if 
only we have eyes to see them. And what a realm it is ! 
Wide it is as duty, character, life, immortality, possibility, 
trnth, God ! How far, how deep, how much we see, if 
our eyes are purged, and if faith helps our vision ! What 
visions come to us in the hours of divine visitation, in the 
great crisis of a soul's regeneration, in the revelation of 
Christ to the hungry heart, in the times when possibility 
opens its great doors, and we take in the great facts of 
our fellowship with God, and the immortality of our be- 
ing ! If only there be spiritual illumination, there is a 
boundless world of things to see. 

There is the vision of God. For Time and Matter, and 
all visible things, are but his variable vesture, and through 
the created come gleams of the uncreated and infinite 
One. It is a blind eye which cannot see Him. It is a 
dull eye which sees only an Infinite Mechanic who has 
made a very complicated and excellent machine, and who 
needs this to prove his existence. But the mind which 
knows God sees always through the apparent to the real, 
and finds the universe transparent and luminous with the 
Living One. Some revelations of Him, some suggestions 
of his presence, are always coming to such a mind, even 
out of the changeable and perishable world. 

There is the vision of God. And in Christ it is clear 
and satisfying. It is a new and ample and inexhaustible 
revelation. Even in Christ, God is not understood at 
once. It takes long experience to appreciate Nature in all 
her lights and meanings, her constant laws, her infinite vari- 
ations. We must know her by day and night, in all sea- 
sons, in all moods, in her parts and her whole, in all rela- 
tions of harmony or diversity, in her shy and reserved 
hours, and even then she remains unknown and full of 
new surprises. At Damascus the vision of Jesus broke 
sudden and dazzling upon the soul of Paul. But he went 



THE HEAVENLY VISION. 355 

on, and the more he knew of Christ the more remained 
to be known. It was not the man Christ Jesus that kept 
him at the study. It was the Divine light coming in con- 
stant floods through him, the always enlarging vision of 
God and his unsearchable grace, which held him fast. 
The first hour of his new life was one of great spiritual 
discoveries, of wonderful disclosures of God's glory. But 
while a thousand things in his old life faded and van- 
ished, this continued and augmented. And this vision of 
God, of an unseen Christ, is no dream of imagination, no 
heat and distemper of the excited brain. 

It is real as God is real. This reaching of the human 
heart after an Almighty Father, this endless supplication 
going into the skies, does not lose itself in the empty space, 
but finds what it goes after. There is nothing in all hu- 
man experience, no knowledge of nature, no ideal of the 
poet, no love of one person for another, more real than 
this very experience of religion, of the sight of the Ever- 
lasting God. And this vision of Christ, and of God in 
Him, of Christ and all the truth and hope and help and 
redemption which are in Him, this faith in an unseen Sa- 
viour and Master, which becomes sight and actual experi- 
ence to the soul, which sometimes rises into rapture and 
exultation, which not more inflames the imagination and 
the feeling than it directs the practical energies, is the 
experience to be coveted, and by all means, and in the 
forsaking of all things, to be gained. 

And with the vision of God in Christ is the expectation 
and bright hoj)e of the coming of God's kingdom in the 
world. It seems a dream to many that there should ever 
be any such mighty revolution, changing not only the 
face but the very life of the world. And yet from the 
beginning this vision of a better and renovated world in 
which righteousness dwells and rules has been going be- 
fore all Christian peojDle to animate their courage and 
hope. What an inspiration it has been, — this vision of 



356 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

the prophets, this great hope of the Church ! Perhaps 
there are visionaries who expect impossible things. There 
are wild dreams of social reform, of human perfectibil- 
ity. But so are there visions of a divine kingdom, which 
are not all visions, but which are the natural anticipa- 
tions of faith. Without them there would be little at- 
tempted and little accomplished. They have sprung out 
of the Gospel, and give mighty impulse to the diffusion 
of it, and to all labor for human improvement and re- 
demption. 

And as for this world, so for another. It is a great lift 
for the soul to raise itself up to this hope and vision of an 
immortal life ; to have it not merely for a guess, but a 
conviction ; to have the prescient vision of it, the sight of 
it, as real, as sure, as of whatever is this side of it. And 
not the bare fact of perpetuated existence as some conclu- 
sion of the reason, but to see and feel it, and be lifted by 
it, and take in all its great scope, and have in perpetual 
view this other life, not as immortal only, but in all its am- 
plitude of privilege, as redeemed and purified and glorified 
by Christ, — the hope of this, rising into vision, has been 
inspiration and victory to all contending souls. And when 
it is gone, and the future has no clearness, even in the 
light of Christ, and the only prospect is death and a 
handful of dust, — extinction or worse, — there is no com- 
fort and no hope then. This is what we want ; an immor- 
tality that is not an idea or a belief or a doctrine, but a 
constant and beautiful and haunting vision, which carries 
the soul all the time forward into the presence of Christ. 
This tendency and habit of the mind confirmed, the future 
always and full in view, the world to come made visible in 
the brightness of a constant hope and aspiration, — all this 
alters life because such a vast province is annexed to it. 
What at first was caught only in some fortunate glimpses 
of a brighter hour, becomes a steady and sure sight of a 
clear reality. The eye fits itself to the distance, and sees 



THE HEAVENLY VISION. 357 

the King in his beauty and the land which is far off. The 
sonl brightens with the grander prospect, and feels upon 
it all the influence of so vast an imagination. The graves 
of the world become transparent, and faith looks through 
them into another world and a larger life. 

And as for another life, so for this. For it is with the 
future our dreams play, and it is among the possibilities 
of our coming days that we have our visions. And it is 
the special office of religion to create the sublime dissat- 
isfactions, the fair ideals, the high ambitions, the large 
aspirations, which redeem life from its commonness, and 
lift it to heights otherwise unattained. So Christianity 
has gone among the nations, breathing into them new and 
nobler hopes, stirring their discontent with what is, their 
aspiration for something better, and holding up new and 
higher ideals to draw them out of their stagnation and 
baseness. It is this kindling vision of grander possibility, 
this appropriation of the future in advance and planting 
in it hopes and aims which may, many of them, come to 
no fruit, this power of faith, even of imagination, reaching 
forward into the unknown years which are coming, and 
erecting there its castles in the air, which makes a man a 
nobler creature than if he lived only from hand to mouth, 
and never thought, never dreamed, never aspired, never 
preempted a future which is his only in hope. Such 
dreams belong to our youth. They flush the sky of morn- 
ing, though they often fade before noon. Imagination 
and hope are fresh, and fly higher than in the weary days 
of our disappointment and unsuccess. We then think we 
can " pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon." 
Achievement seems easy. In this ingenuous season of 
freedom, of aspiration, of hope, before habits are fixed, 
before the wings have been broken in the rough wind, 
there come fairy visions of what we shall do and what we 
shall be. We will gain this, we will accomplish that. I 
will avoid this man's weakness and that man's sin. I will 



358 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

keep my honor, while I gain the world's. I will live gen- 
erously, purely, honorably, usefully. I will not fail, but 
by God's blessing succeed. And so to our dream life is 
to be a beautiful river, running always in the sun, wind- 
ing at its sweet will, nothing to do but to receive and run 
on. Such visions, such dreams we call them afterwards, 
have visited every one of you. And it is good for you that 
you have them. You will be better for them, even though 
the bright morning turns gray and cold by and by. 

" Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing Boy, 
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows 

He sees it in his joy ; 
The Youth, who daily farther from the east 

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended ; 
At length the Man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day." 

Your visions may fade, and many of them will. If 
they are only earthly, perhaps it is better they should, if 
only the heavenly vision grows and brightens. But there 
are visions which may be realized. They will not be if 
you do not have them. Have them. Cherish them. Let 
faith kindle them. Let experience help them. Never 
lose the sight of higher, greater, better things. Never let 
the world, the disappointment of life, the waking out of 
earthly dreams, darken the heavenly vision. Keep the 
eyes open to what is beyond. Bate not a jot of hope's in- 
spiration. Keep your visions, for they are the good angels 
of God to hold your steps in the hard way and through 
the dark battle. 

And to do this, vision and action must go together. It 
is obedience to the heavenly vision which keeps it and 
fulfills it. It is not by lowering the standard, dismissing 
the vision, ceasing from your ideals, but it is by fidelity to 



THE HEAVENLY VISION. 359 

the liigliest thing God has given you to see, that you re- 
tain and that you accomplish them. It is not by keeping 
our dreams as mere visions of the night, but by turning 
them into daylight realities, that they answer the purpose 
for which God sends them. Columbus had his dream of 
a rounded world, and a path to the golden Indies by way 
of the west. He did not sit down to indulge his dream, 
but he traveled and besought and sacrificed, and then 
committed himself to the unknown Atlantic, that he might 
bring true his dream, or find it false and begin again. It 
is not enough to see an ideal beauty in Christ and a Chris- 
tian life, to draw fair pictures of it, to sing its praises, to 
hope for it, and dream of its coming to us in some fortu- 
nate hour. If it is only a vision, nothing more, if we see 
all we might be and ought to be, if great possibility in 
Christ dawns upon and cheers us, and we do not make 
the possible actual and the vision a reality, we are infidels 
and worse. We waste the vision which with infinite pains 
God has sent upon our eyes, and which has led us nowhere 
and goes out in darkness. 

For this is the secret of such unrest as vexes a thou- 
sand bosoms to-day, and from which I would have you 
spared. It is this continual reproach and torment of 
large ideals and small performance, of a keen sense of 
duty and a sluggish and disobedient will, of all noble vis- 
ions which end in themselves. And this, on the other 
hand, is the lifting up and continual joy of the soul, that 
it follows the alluring vision and never lets it go, that it 
apprehends that for which it has been apprehended of 
Christ. 

For this, again, is the peril of losing the vision which is 
not obeyed, of quenching the Spirit which inflames our 
souls for a time with such brio^ht lio^ht. This has the 
force of a law in God's rule over the mind, that the truth 
we are unfaithful to loses its evidence and its power, and 
dies, or departs from the mind. So it was with the first 



360 ADDRESSLS AND SEIiMONS. 

Saul, the Hebrew king. In his infidelity to his high call- 
ing, the Lord departed from him and made no more com- 
munication with him. So might it have been with the 
other and second Saul. He might have forgotten his 
vision of Christ's glory and lost it, and sunk back into a 
poor Pharisee again, had he fled from his call, and turned 
back from the prize which was set before him. 

Do not trifle with your heavenly visions, and extinguish 
them by inaction or disobedience. If you hear any nobler 
word, if at any hour there comes to you any inspiring 
vision, clasp it like some angel, and wrestle with it to 
the breaking of the day, and do not let it go till it bless 
you. 

And now for you, dear friends, this word is spoken, 
and makes its own application to you. The veil has been 
lifted from much that you did not know, and you have 
been " beholding the bright countenance of Truth in the 
quiet and still air of delightful studies." It has been the 
great and golden opportunity of your fortunate youth to 
spend it here, where, undistracted by care, unsolicited by 
pleasure, you could give your thoughts and your studies 
to the best things. And if before you, in the midst of 
this studious seclusion, have risen visions of duty, of char- 
acter, of useful service, of life made better by making 
other lives better ; if here some light of Christ has arisen 
upon you, and you have seen that face which Paul saw at 
Damascus and never forgot ; if in Him you have seen a 
grander possibility for this life, and your only grand hope 
for another, — hold it and do not let go. Do not be dis- 
obedient to that divine voice, which comes to-day again 
and with fresh emphasis, with your feet on the threshold, 
and going out from this dear house of your opportunity 
and your filial love, but listen, and in your heart of hearts 
say, I will not leave my Saviour behind with so much 
that I must forsake. He shall go with me, this sweet 
vision, this beautiful ideal, this divine friend. I will do 



THE HEAVENLY VISION. 361 

what I know. I will follow where this vision leads. I 
will obey the word of his which I have heard. I will not 
lose what is worth all life is worth. 

Dear friends, dear children, if I may say it, carry with 
you our hopes, our affections, our benedictions, our prayers, 
our tender, last farewells. 



THE MISSIONAEY RESOURCES OF THE 
KINGDOM OF CHRIST.i 

" Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth 
not down first, and eonsulteth whether he be able with ten thousand 
to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand ? " — 
Luke xiv. 32. 

We turn aside to-night from deliberation and debate, 
from questions of method and policy, for worship and re- 
ligious edification, to hear the Word of God, to recall our 
work in its more spiritual aspects, its nature, its princi- 
ples, its authority, its power and progress, its resources 
and results. It is a great work. Years and experience 
do not diminish the impression of its magnitude. It rises 
on our larger knowledge, greater and increasing in diffi- 
culty and in glory. In every way, — in its nature and its 
scope ; in the space it is to cover ; in the numbers it is to 
include ; in the grandeur of its purposes, whether in the 
evil to be conquered or in the benefit to be administered ; 
in its results, deep as human nature, broad as society, 
eternal as the soul, — it knows no rival. Missions con- 
template the displacement of all other religions, to make 
Christ's the only one, to make it supreme ; the creation of 
a new spiritual life in evil and dead souls and I'aces, and 
prospectively of a new civilization of the world. It is an 
undertaking before which human wisdom or ambition 
might shrink. It stretches itself to a conquest altogether 
unparalleled in human history. No scheme of commerce 
or of colonization ; no ambition of empire, — of Alexan- 

1 Preached at the Semi-centennial of the American Baptist Mission- 
ary Union, May 24, 18C4. 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 363 

der, Caesar, Napoleon ; no philosophy, no religion, — ever 
sought or dreamed such a result, so large, so difficult. 
All other revolutions are bubbles in the stream compared 
with this. 

Its greatness will be an oppression or an inspiration, ac- 
cording to our view of it. In the face of all this vast, an- 
cient, hardened heathendom, we might stop in dumb de- 
spair, appalled and impotent before its terrible grandeur. 
To confront gods whose thrones are as old almost as his- 
tory, and ruling three quarters of mankind ; to supplant 
religions to which Christianity is a child in age and in in- 
fluence ; to unweave the falsehoods knit into the thought 
and habit of nations organized, inlaid, consecrated, auto- 
cratic ; to invade the spiritual beliefs of whole races on the 
other side of the globe, — is either insane or sublime. It 
will either daunt or instigate, according as it seems pos- 
sible or not. To know that the odds against us is in num- 
bers, not in power ; that missions go into this conquest 
equal to it ; that Christendom, standing in the minority, 
yet carries in it and with it forces and allies sufficient, — 
turns the very difficulty and magnitude of the enterprise, 
the sad magnificence of human sin and misery, into an in- 
spiration. It becomes the mighty provocation of faith, 
and calls out all its reserves of power. 

At any rate, the lines are formed, the orders are given, 
the field is set, the battle is joined ; it is Christendom 
against Heathendom, and the one which carries weight 
and the heaviest resources is to win at last. And which ? 
Are we able to take the world for Christ ? Can it be 
done by missions ? It is denied, philosophy in the name 
of civilization denies, that Christianity can dispost every 
alien relie^ion and evang-elize all races. If it has indeed 
become the religion of the puissant and leading races, per- 
haps has given them their precedence, still, it is alleged, 
there remain great, sullen, sluggish masses of mind im- 
penetrable to the spiritual ideas and incapable of the vir- 



364 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

tues of the Gospel. At any rate, tbe}^ must go through a 
preparatory dispensation of civilization before they are 
ready for Christ. And the confidence of Christians is not 
always fixed and sanguine. They know the difficulty, the 
resistance ; the land for them is full of a people greater 
and stronger than they ; but they do not know how much 
strength, reserved strength, what help, divine help, stands 
pledge for final success. They have not weighed some 
great facts which must incline the scale inevitably to- 
wards Christ. Their distrust comes of too narrow a mea- 
sure of the forces actually engaged to this result. They 
do not know the possibilities, the undeveloped energies, 
the resources, actual and latent, of this enterprise of 
missions. They need to contemplate, as we shall for the 
hour, — 

THE MISSIONARY RESOURCES OF THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 

That many of them should be latent ; that God should 
hold in reserve yet unused forces ; that, unrecognized, un- 
disclosed, waiting their time, there should yet lie in germ 
the secret and coming powers which are to destroy hea- 
thenism and enlarge the kingdom of God ; that this, like 
every great movement, should grow by the evolution of 
hidden energies, is only to state the method of Providence 
and the law of history. That Christianity should be ca- 
pable of something more; that its forces are not exhausted, 
not yet all brought into action even ; that the kingdom of 
redemption should carry in it supplies for every new de- 
mand and a constant growth; in a word, resources equal 
to its destiny, — is only to say that Christ, its Head, is di- 
vine, and his riches unsearchable. That in present re- 
sources, already partially employed, there should be still 
hidden unknown quantities of power, waiting to be called 
into action ; that every known resource, however old, is 
capable of great expansion, — is not different from the 
fact that mind is dormant without education, or the soil 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 365 

fallow and fruitless without agriculture. Kaise every 
agency now at work for the world's conversion to its 
tenth power, and the kingdoms of darkness would shake 
out of their place. 

I. In taking account now of our Missionary Resources, 
we begin inevitably with the Truth, Christianity itself, 
that doctrine of God which is the special and peculiar pos- 
session and instrument of the Church, the one thing she is 
trying to plant in the mind of heathendom. She has truth 
which is nowhere else ; which man has never found ; which 
no euterprise has ever used ; which is in no philosophy, no 
religion, no scheme of philanthropy, of morals ; separate, 
peculiar, divine. She did not borrow it of Aristotle or 
of Bacon, of science or of civilization. She received it of 
God. And it is like Him, so pure, so mighty, so eternal. 
It is no speculation, no sentiment, but a solid, living, 
smiting doctrine. This the Church has, if she will only 
use it. She need not go beating the air, blowing bubbles of 
excitement or of transient empire. She is intrusted with 
such truth as touches the bottom of all things ; doctrine 
strengthening, vitalizing, majestic ; the stuff out of which 
a divine virtue is made, a divine emjiire is built. She has 
this to rely on. She need not hurry. She need not wait. 
She need not put on appearances of strength. She need 
not tremble at an 3^ reed shaken in the wind.- This is her 
strength, and it is real, — this solid artillery of Bible doc- 
trine. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against 
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the 
darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in 
high places. And nothing carries the day but that which 
is charged of God with such power as He has put into the 
doctrines of the Cross. Evil is not an appearance, it is a 
vital, terrible reality. Words and wind and flourish will 
not kill it ; nothing but this strong, hot, patient, undying 
truth of God's Word. And that we have. And with 
that, what shall be too hard to subdue ? 



ij66 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

It is the truth which the world hungers and dies for, 
the only medicine and regeneration of a groaning crea- 
tion. The wretched and the dying can look nowhere else. 
It is the truth of God, but it is the truth for man. He 
gives, He maintains it. By it his throne stands or falls. 
For He is pledged to it. And by it poor, sick, restless, 
aspiring yet sinking human nature lives or dies. It is 
truth high as man's intelligence, deep as his sin, yet kin- 
dred to his best affections. It is not an abstraction, a 
philosophy, a hard, cold system of science and law. It is 
truth bathed in love, and warm with life ; truth not spied 
out in the cold eternities above the stars, but gushing from 
eternal love, tender, searching, divine. 

Therefore is it a truth which has power ; which goes 
where logic cannot; which strikes home to man's spiritual 
nature, to sharpen his conscience, to break his heart. It is 
truth in Jesus, with his divine Life, his personal power 
in it. And the human mind has found no mightier power, 
after all. Science has gone far, and brought back much. 
It has sounded the sky. It has cracked open the earth. 
It has made the wovlds transparent. It has kindled a 
light on the far horizons of being. It has found methods 
of timeless communication, of painless surgery. It builds 
a grand material civilization. But it has never found the 
secret of human happiness, the way of spiritual peace and 
everlasting life. It cannot penetrate an inch into the 
grave to make that transparent. It kindles no light on 
worlds beyond our horizon. It creates no holiness, while 
it multiplies luxuries. It builds no kingdom of God with 
its lenses and engines. It subjects nature to man ; it does 
not bend man to God. No literature, no art, has invented 
any ideal person even, and civilization has produced no 
real one, like Christ. With Him we go to the heathen ; 
Christ, the Divine Man, true to our nature, tender to our 
infirmities, yet perfect above all human excellence ; Christ, 
the Incarnate God, to whom all their polytheisms, even 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 367 

their pantheisms point, hungry for some manifestation of 
Deity ; Christ, the Divine Sacrifice, supplanting their 
hideous, costly worships, extinguishing their smoking al- 
tars, taking away the sin of the world. What the law 
could not do, neither literature nor science nor civiliza- 
tion, the Truth in Christ can. That is mighty to all spir- 
itual results. 

It is truth which has been tested, which has lived and 
conquered by its ow^n vitality. It has shaken what noth- 
ing else could. It has shaken earth, and also heaven ; 
for it takes hold upon both. It shook Jupiter out of his 
Olympus, — the fairest, finest mythology of all nations, 
— out of the world. It emptied the Valhalla, — mighty 
against the barbarous and polished alike. It has been 
buried, like Christ, to rise again. Persecution could not 
kill it. It survived corruption. It is not bound. Shut 
up in prison with its martyrs ; confined in church or creed, 
in channels and mechanisms ; repressed and watched, — a 
silent might sleeps in its secret places, and bursts forth 
like lightning from the cloud. 

And then, as Lord Bacon says of Prophecy, it is of 
" springing and germinant accomplishment." There are 
in the Bible undeveloped, unfolding germs of doctrine. 
" More truth is to break forth out of God's Holy Word," 
said Robinson at Leyden. Truth is constant and eternal, 
but knowledge is progressive. There are stars so distant 
that their light, traveling since the beginning of the world, 
has not yet reached our eyes. There are meanings in 
Providence and in God's Word which have not yet ar- 
rived, and still dark ; as in the Old Testament are things 
which received their true explanation only in the New ; 
as the Gospel needs the sin and misery of our entire 
humanity to be applied by missions on no narrower scale 
than the whole world, before its grace shall be entirely 
unfolded. The Cross, like Nature, like God, has never 
been found out unto perfection, and is pregnant yet with 



368 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

life for all new exigencies of missions, for the entire con- 
version of the race. There is to be, too, a separating, de- 
fecating process, in which Christendom is to part with its 
monstrous accretions, perversions, hidings of the pure doc- 
trine of God, so that it shall be like a new revelation and 
development of truth, as it comes forth like the sun in his 
strength. 

Let the Church know what a weapon she has, forged 
and tempered and drawn now before the nations, for this 
very office. Should her love swell till it is like Paul's, 
like the angels', she could ask Heaven to put into her 
hand no instrument so fit, so sufficient. Let her know her 
advantage over all human institutions, over all philanthro- 
pies and charities, and infinitely over heathendom, in that 
she has the Truth. Let her know it, believe it, use it. 
Going forth with it, a torch in the darkness, a sword to 
smite a sleeping or a resisting world, what may she not 
do ? For what in the earth is like Truth, and what is sure 
of the world but that? There is nothing greater. At 
last there shall be nothing else. " Great is the Truth, and 
stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the 
Truth, and the heaven blesseth it ; all works shake and 
tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for 
the Truth it endureth, and is always strong, it liveth and 
conquereth for evermore." ^ 

II. But this resource is not complete till you add to it 
another, mightier still, belonging to it, inseparable from it. 
The Church believes and employs a Truth which is not 
only peculiar, divine, mighty in itself, but to which alone 
the Spirit of God is pledged, with which He works. This 
Spirit of Truth Christ has procured by his Ascension, and 
for himself, to go where He goes, to search and soften and 
open the heart of the world for Him, and for no other. 
This Spirit goes where other influences cannot, strikes the 
one decisive blow which undermines the kingdom of dark- 
1 1 Esdras iv. 35-38. 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 369 

ness, and gives the world to the people of the Most High. 
It is a power which strikes to the bottom, and secretly 
takes possession of the inmost throne of the mind for 
God. And thus, whatever flourish Satan may make on 
the surface, his power is gone. 

By this the Church herself is empowered, created in- 
deed, soul of her body, breath of her life. Without the 
living Spirit of God, she may be strong, she may be rich ; 
her officers may be the rivals of kings, her treasure the 
revenue of nations, her worship venerable with the hoar 
of a thousand years ; she is a tomb, not the Ark of God's 
Covenant. Having the Spirit, especially filled with the 
Spirit, she is taught of God, and able to teach others 
also ; charity, purity, trust grow ; the lusts of the flesh, 
the love of the world die ; and she shines, her light being 
come. 

But so, also, is the Spirit her ally, and really unfathomed 
resource for the work of missions, because the Spirit comes 
to prayer, and goes with the Gospel. Standing before the 
awful falsehoods, the old, stubborn, deep-rooted religions 
of Paganism, as before a range of mountains, pleading 
with God, plying the truth, this secret energy, like an ele- 
mental force of nature, dissolves them down to dust. We 
stand not alone prophesying to the dead. Preaching the 
Gospel of God, we prepare the way for the Spirit of God ; 
and they carry with them that regeneration which in- 
volves the mightiest moral changes. To this the Spirit is 
pledged, to allow no word of God to return unto Him 
void, to satisfy the travail of the Redeemer's soul. 

Let missions take inspiration from the faith which 
grasps this supreme fact. Unseen, mysterious, indepen- 
dent as this power is, inscrutable in operation, blowing 
where it listeth, yet it is a fact, so sure, so supporting, that 
the very faith of it imparts courage. And it is an energy 
which, by its very nature, by the fact that it is Divine, 
proceeding from the Father and the Son, and of necessity 

24 



370 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

su£Bcient for the ultimate and perfected work of the Gos- 
pel, must, therefore, be an ample, rich, perpetual fund of 
supply for missions. There yet lies latent here — as winds 
lie calm in the air of a summer noon, as heat immense lies 
cold and hidden yet in the mountains of coal — the bless- 
ing and the life of nations, the infinite enlargement of 
Zion. Alter the levels of the continents a little, and the 
ocean drives in, pushing its shores back to the inland hills. 
In Christianity rests that vast residuum of yet unused, 
even unknown grace of the Spirit, wdiich breaking forth 
will flood new lands with Christ's life and praise. Not 
yet have men begun to know the infinite riches of this 
grace, as it will be revealed when applied to the soul of 
churches and nations, to clarify the spiritual vision, to en- 
large and quicken the spiritual consciousness, to make 
men, even in masses, new in Christ. It will be like add- 
ing a new revelation of spiritual things, duplicating what 
we have, as its mysteries of truth and love are unfolded. 
Like the telescope added to astronomy, steam to the in- 
dustry of the world, gunpowder to war, emancipation to 
serfs, like the climate of the Gulf Stream to England, like 
the gift of any new power, will be the released and en- 
larged operation of the Spirit. The light of the moon 
shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun 
shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days. 

When, therefore, it begins to be thought that Christ's 
kingdom must take the fate of all other empires, die out, 
pass away, at any rate relinquish its dream of universal 
ilominion, it is forgotten that back of it is the Spirit of the 
Living God, unlimited, unexhausted, replenishing forever, 
reviving the dead, breaking out in the desert, flaming 
forth in Pentecosts, poured out upon all flesh. Such a re- 
source must not be left out of account. It were like omit- 
ting heat from calculations of the weather, the atmosphere 
in determining the conditions of life. A religion which, 
not, like the religions of the world, living by the human 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 371 

forces in them, is charged, recruited, increased by a force 
above the world, carries in its own bosom the augury and 
pledge of victory. 

III. In the train of the Truth and the Spirit comes the 
Church, organized, endowed by them, and ordained of 
God for this very office. Through whatever indirect, un- 
commissioned agents Christianity is to come into contact 
with the world, \^4th its paganism and sin, with the human 
mind, surely its main reliance must be on that society of 
Christian people within which it is incorporate, incarnate, 
trustee of its mighty benefit. Christendom, indeed, is 
leavened with its influences, is moved by its secret ener- 
gies ; its civilization is born of the Gospel, and stands 
witness for it before the nations. But much of its reli- 
gion is sensuous, ritual, corrupt, apostate, and its actual, 
faithful Church, true to Christ and engaged to his ser- 
vice against all evil, is relatively small. But there is a 
Church, j)raying, contending, faithful, born of God, linked 
to his throne, ready to do or die. After all sifting and 
reduction, there remains a people able in God to do great 
things ; tenfold more than revolutionized the Roman Em- 
pire, — enough to do anything for which God has made 
the world ready. It remains the one institute on earth 
charged with this one work. It is the one special power 
whose weight is to be cast decisively into the conflict of 
the world's destiny. 

The Church may seem small, feeble, and entirely insuf- 
ficient for the position given to it in the redemption of the 
race. It may seem most unreasonable to some persons, to 
hang the expectation of changing the religion and the life 
of three quarters of mankind on anything to be done by a 
fraction, perhaps a minority, of the other quarter. It 
looks like an immense and absurd disproportion. But 
one cannot look into it without seeing that after all this is 
the most elastic institution in the world, and full of a latent 
power ; that it is capable of indefinite increase. It is a 



372 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

collection of suppressed, reserved forces. It has never 
yet fairly shown itself. Its whole might has never been 
called out. It is one of those resources, like all divine 
ones, in which slumber the vast, invisible possibilities of a 
kingdom which shall have no end. Once an upper cham- 
ber could hold it, as once an acorn held the forest. Nei- 
ther Caiaphas nor Csesar, neither priest nor emperor, sus- 
pected the might which slumbered in that little society 
which, before long, was to bring Judaism to an end, and 
turn the basilicas of Rome into the temples of its worship. 
It is capable of indefinite increase outward. Christen- 
dom might be made into it ; not influenced by it, but ab- 
sorbed into it ; held all of it by faith to Christ Jesus, one 
large, luminous, compact body of Christian life, a league 
of nations taking up the world in its strong arms to give it 
to its Lord. Its powers, organs, helps, its schools, clergy, 
missionaries, its funds, facilities, charities, may be multi- 
plied, and need to be ; that is, when it can carry them. 
It may be loaded beyond its strength, rich in all things 
except that inward power by which the day is to be won 
at last. For with all resources now latent, to be devel- 
oped, it is the spiritual which are deepest, richest, and rule 
the rest. All powers in the Church have their springs 
really in one ; at any rate, all latent forces would break 
forth with the increase of that. It is character. It is 
not belief, nor feeling, nor action. It is these, and more 
than these, and beneath them, that personal, permanent 
character, the fruit of the grace of God, which is capable 
of such elevation in the whole body of Christians as it 
has reached in the few whose superior virtue is remem- 
bered and " blossoms in the dust.'* It is character which 
is a fund of reserved power, just as mind is, educated, dis- 
ciplined, the mind of the man above the child, of Europe 
above Africa. God has made provision for its growth, 
that it may be increased with all the increase of God. 
And this is really the most fruitful source of missionary 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 373 

power to the Church in itself, in the latent resources which 
it must inevitably develop. Like subsoiling in agriculture, 
it strengthens the base. It keeps a head of water above 
the mill. It is like the inbred pluck and muscular energy 
of the Anglo-Saxon, breaking forth in revolutions, colo- 
nies, civilization, in inevitable superiority. It is capital 
vested for all the calls of an adventurous Christendom. 
It is one of the secret, silent, elemental forces, as in Na- 
ture, which work mightily and beyond all else. The 
power which holds down the mountains, which is compact 
and impact of this solid and rolling globe, is impalpable. 
The viewless forces which paint the earth white in winter 
and green in summer ; which, with their wonderful chem- 
istry, produce the fine vicissitudes of the sky and the sea- 
sons, — are known only as they appear in their effects. 
The mightiest powers of increment in Christianity and 
its Church are not in its instruments and organization, not 
even in its ministries and worships first, so much as in its 
moral invisible life, in will, love, passion, imagination, in- 
telligence, soul, wrought and refined by the grace of God 
into character, — strong, arduous, high character. She 
breaks forth into grandeur and conquest, in Reformations, 
Revivals, Puritanisms, Methodisms, Missions, when the 
fountains of the great deep are broken up, and she lives 
in the infinite life of her Lord. Truth, Righteousness, 
Liberty, and Life in God, not money, these are her funds. 
Let there be some signal change, some visible elevation in 
the general level of Christian character in the Church, in 
principle, in consistency, in conscientiousness, in all hu- 
mane as well as divine virtues, not in transient spasms of 
religiousness, but in a constant energy of spiritual convic- 
tion and life, and the effect on the progress of Missions 
would be as perceptible as of the increased temperature of 
May in the color of the fields. A great fund of blessing 
in itself, it would at once intensify and bring into action 
all other latent powers. 



374 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

It would be a great remedial, conservative force. It 
would increase missionary resources by stopping the drain 
in false and useless directions. Our Christianity has other 
work on hand besides the conversion of the heathen. It 
is struggling in the bosom of our civilization with old and 
stubborn evils. It is applying itself to great questions of 
social order and reorganization, of morals, politics, econ- 
omy. Nothing is hid from the heat thereof. And so that 
happens which befalls all weakness and lack of practical 
power. The Church, unable, because of a low range of 
character, to meet all demands between so many calls, has 
not enough for them all, distributes itself, and lets what 
force it has run into many useless, or doubtful, at any rate 
minor enterprises. That is absorbed into the local which 
belongs to the universal. That is given to a class which 
belongs to mankind. What is given to the slave and 
the drunkard, to civic and social duty, is often withdrawn 
from the heathen; and he who ought to be a large, 
roundabout Christian is only a reformer or an agitator. 
It is the magnificent and divine benefit of Missions that, 
attempting nothing less than the conversion of the whole 
world, nothing short of an eternal salvation, pitched on 
the grand scale of the whole kingdom of God, which in- 
cludes all social reorganization and progress, it thereby 
abolishes our hateful narrowness, and encourages a spirit 
great, catholic, comprehensive as itself. And what the 
Church needs, what is in her, if only it were awakened, is 
the power to yoke all her enterprises abreast, and to be 
true to the least and the greatest duties together. If 
Christianity is not great enough for this, then it is a nar- 
row, local, feeble religion after all. It is. But the im- 
pediment lies in the Church, in contracted, suppressed 
character, waiting for an enlargement equal to the great- 
ness of its office. Develop it and waste would be checked, 
power would be economized for all the great, imperative 
needs of the world, and of God's kingdom in it. 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 375 

Sucli a development of now latent cliai'acter would rem- 
edy defects and hindrances, would disengage Missions 
from incumbrances which now repress the fullness of their 
power. It would be alterative, corrective, medicinal for 
evils incident, it may be, to an enterprise managed by 
men, but only because there is not vital and healthful 
force enough to throw them off. Methods, practices, poli- 
cies, tolerated, perhaps, because any remedy likely to be 
applied would be only something worse, yet repugnant to 
our better, nobler sense of honor and religion, would pass 
away. So much very worldly and prudential wisdom as is 
now considered important in conducting Missions, would 
hardly be necessary. It would no longer be one of the 
most delicate operations known, requiring the rarest order 
of diplomatic genius, such tactics as carries a fort or a 
legislative measure, to obtain funds, keep secrets, repress 
jealousies, pacify if not pacificate missionaries, satisfy con- 
tributors, humble or appease rivals, appeal to pride in- 
stead of charity, and in general manage a work which a 
nobler religious spirit would make as simple, sincere, spon- 
taneous as the Gospel itself. Evolve the latent heats of 
a purer religious life, and they would burn up the wood, 
hay, stubble, with which we are trying to build the City 
of God. Bore to artesian depths ; apply the weight of the 
atmosphere, instead of a force-pump, to the fountains of 
charity; let the stream run the mill, instead of turning the 
wheels by hand ; add to missions the energies now dor- 
mant, — and these evils would disappear. Thou carriest 
them away as with a flood. 

And so the Church would be able to manage increased 
power, privilege, blessing. She could bear success. For 
it appears to be one of the mysteries of Providence that 
the spread of the Gospel should be delayed, and often 
great recessions and defeats should overtake the cause of 
religion, until we see that God w^orks with both hands ; 
that He carries forward many purposes together ; that He 



376 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

makes events, the conquest of new empire, wait till the 
Churcli is ready ; that He gives success till the Church is 
inflated and corrupted by it, — then she must be remanded 
to the desert, and drink tears in great measure. Strong, 
victorious, she ceases to be humble, dependent. Weak in 
Christian character, the people of God are unable to rec- 
oncile in their work their own energy and God's sover- 
eignty ; unable to bear success, and so unfit to have it. 
Therefore, for so great a trust as is given to the Church of 
God in these days, there needs to be an immense increase 
of moral power, not only to do her work, but to bear the 
effects of it. God must withhold the world from her till 
she is able to possess and take care of it. She must grow 
to the greatness of her office and destiny. A fortune fall- 
ing to an incompetent prodigal is a calamity ; a Zulu or a 
Mikir could not use a theodolite or a steam-engine ; it 
would be monstrous improvidence for the Government, in 
order to encourage immigration, to bestow homesteads on 
Irish and Germans who stop in the slums of New York ; 
and until the Church calls out, not only the blind people 
who have eyes, and the deaf people who have ears, but also 
her latent energies, and puts on a new style of character, 
till she grows to the greatness of her mission, will God 
keep back from a Church unready the hour which shall 
strike her victory. She may win by some fortunate throw : 
but her gain will be taken away. She must come to suc- 
cess in her work, to her work breaking forth on the right 
hand and on the left, in the strength of inspirations she 
cannot keep in, in a soul, a charity, in a robust Christian 
virtue, great as her work, her resources, her destiny. 

So enlarged, empowered, girded, the secret wealth which 
lies folded in the very fact of her divine regeneration de- 
veloped, all personal, social, pecuniary, religious resources 
in her brought into use, her laity, her clergy, her con- 
gregations, her colleges, her discipline, her theology, her 
prayers, her interior life, her outside means of influence, 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 377 

all sfcretclied to their capacity, armed for action, and 
directed toward heatliendom, to what other human institu- 
tion need Christianity look ? Not so great as the Truth, 
as the Spirit, in their might she may be great for this di- 
vine work. With a Church which has survived the world 
in which it was born, its philosophies, its thrones ; child 
of God ; joint-heir with Christ ; the ark of human hopes-? 
the depository of God's covenant ; charged with the Gos- 
pel for mankind ; already holding the strongest points and 
the best people ; capable of vast increase in numbers, ho- 
liness, influence, — she may be small, a lily among thorns ; 
she may need purging, reducing, nevertheless here is a 
Church, a society of Christian people, the corporate life 
and power of Christianity in the world, and into this God 
has put the great human resource for the redemption of 
the race. 

IV. There is laid up for Missions a great store of prov- 
idential resources, — such preparations, cooperations as 
lie in Eternal providence; such as faith sees, — for faith 
is allowed to reckon its treasures, — and only faith knows 
how to link such a movement with the wide, majestic 
movements of God's universal order. 

For, first, faith goes back of all things into God's eter- 
nity, his original thought and plan, his eternal determina- 
tion and sovereignty, and moves forward in the strength 
of that ; nay, sees all things moving after that, by its 
silent, resistless impulse. There is nothing in this world 
so strong as the faith which rests here, which stops no- 
where short of God's decree, his absolute determination ; 
which knows that it was settled beforehand, as sure as it 
ever will be, before the world was made, in spite of every- 
thing, that God would redeem out of it a people for his 
praise. Nothing, unless it be that purpose itself, stronger 
than all things, pushing through all the mass and vicissi- 
tude of things, silentl}^, irresistibly to the predestined re- 
sult. Here Christianity rests, or nowhere. It is of God, 



378 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

the execution of his majestic purpose, formed in wisdom, 
and fixed in his eternal choice, or it is nothing. What- 
ever proves it true, divine, settles its victory beyond per- 
adventure. You must blot God's handwriting out of the 
Bible, sweep the God and Father of Christ out of history, 
out of existence, before you can annul that word of the 
Lord, girding the earth like an equator of light, — To Me 
every knee shall bow. Go down deep and build on this 
rocky foundation. Go up into the heights of eternal gov- 
ernment to rest and be strong. Believe that already, in 
the counsels of God, the result is fixed and irretrievable ; 
that, whatever fails in this world, the Gospel shall not. 
Hear in every step of this cause the footfall of the Al- 
mighty, whose goings forth have been from of old, from 
everlasting. Hear the Divine decrees strike invisible 
against the far corners of the world to shatter their idola- 
tries. Hear them vibrate in the whisper of scholars, in 
the voice of preachers, among the Syrian hills, in the 
rice-fields of Tenasserim. Hear, in the dip of the mission- 
ary's oar in the waters of the Sal wen, in the soft fall, like 
snowflakes, of your contributions into our treasury to- 
night, the ripple of a wave which started out of the bosom 
of eternal love ere time begun. Let the Church cast her- 
self upon this doctrine, cast herself into this might}^ ten- 
dency, back of which God stands, which Christ leads, to 
live or die with that. For it is the unbeginning, unending 
resource, including all others, their supply and their sure- 
ty. Without it we allow to unbelief that there is a great 
disproportion between the means and the result, that the 
prospect would be dark, if the enterprise of the world's 
conversion were not insane and hopeless. We build on a 
foundation under all things, on somewhat not material, 
not mortal, not finite, on the Word and Will of the 
Eternal. 

Come down now, come out where this will acts, this 
purpose evolves itself in history, where, unless the history 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 379 

of our race is only a fortuitous, disconnected, aimless 
mob of events, there must be some preparations, combina- 
tions, proceedings whicb bear on Christ's kingdom, and 
through it on the world's destiny. For this is the true 
and deeper reading of history which sees a secret purpose 
and law at its heart, and detects underneath the agitations 
of the surface its real direction and end. This is the truly 
philosophic and Christian reading of it, which sees this 
law not originating in it, but impressed upon it by the will 
of a personal God ; which sees at the end a consummation 
alone worthy of history, of man, of his Maker, namely, 
man's redemption. The dip of history is in that direc- 
tion ; its main currents and tendencies go the same way 
Missions go, — towards the unity of the race, with all its 
diversities, in one Head and Lord, even Christ. This is 
not inconsistent with the cardinal Christian doctrine of a 
Fall, and the gravitation of human nature towards the 
worse instead of the better. For the Preadamite ages 
worked out a preparation for man ; the ante-Christian 
centuries, in Pagan as well as in Jewish life, a preparation 
for the Messiah ; and all the experiments in evil of a race 
trying to live without God ; the unsuccess, the utter fail- 
ure of man anywhere to construct true society, or to find a 
true religion once lost ; the fair promise and the brilliant 
achievement of great civilizations and splendid nations 
shattered and devoured in the storms and night of Time ; 
the very miseries and sins and misreligions of Paganism ; 
the awful justice of God sweeping the defiled and bloody 
centuries with its retribution, — all march in the line of 
Divine purpose, preparations or allies of Christ. In the 
vast strategy of so many ages, in the movements of that 
calm Omnipotence which deploys its forces on a field 
broad as the world, to which the awful periods of a world's 
creation are but the days of a week, there will be much 
whose bearing is not understood. But already we are far 
enough along to see where time is going, and to what 



380 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

issue this conflict must come at last. We can see lodged 
already in the bosom of history, in the life of the world, 
in Providence moving great masses, and in grand orbits, 
such possibilities, such cooperations, such hidings of power, 
that Faith does not hesitate to count them allies and inspi- 
rations for Missions. 

Paganism itself contains its elements of explosion and 
decay. Its falsehood may be its strength, but it is also its 
weakness. It is the truth in it only which has given it so 
long lease. The evil in it is a reason why men love it. It 
will be a reason for their hating it when they come to 
know it, to know that which is infinitely better. It has an 
enormous, tenacious vitality. Its roots are tangled into 
all things. But there come periods of revolt, of decay, of 
awakening spiritual instincts, when the human heart is 
wear}^, when the old lie is worn out and ceases to charm. 
Our Lord came into a sick and troubled world, whose 
mythologies were ready to vanish, like dreams at the sun- 
rise of a new time. Such periods may not come simul- 
taneously in universal heathendom. But it is afternoon 
with many of its systems, even with some of its races, and 
their day is far spent. Let Missions strike in the hour 
and place of weakness, and find that Pro^^dence has pre- 
pared and precipitated Christ's victory. The hoUowness 
is there, the latent seed of death, and when the collision 
comes it is the truth which will have the advantage. The 
weakness is not religious only, it is general. In the dis- 
tributions of power in the modern world, it is the Christian 
only that is gaining, and at the expense of the other civi- 
lizations. It only is productive, expansive, vigorous, victo- 
rious, while the others decay. They offer only an inert 
resistance to the more vigorous assaults of Christendom. 
They make no conquests, and so the doom of all impotence 
is on them. They must decline. As between the Chris- 
tian civilization — unless that should grow weak and sick 
by its own internal defects — and all existing civilizations, 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 381 

if they come into collision, there can be no question 
which must go to the wall. That must absorb all the 
savage nations, unless they perish. And the others show 
no signs of undeveloped power. Conquest seems impossi- 
ble ; rejuvenescence and a new lease of empire about as 
impossible. 

There is a resource also in possible events, in the possi- 
bilities which may emerge from the future, which already 
lie in embryo, unsuspected. Events come from their re- 
mote providential retreats, like comets from their far 
journeys, yet punctual to their period, and wheel into the 
line of history, to turn the tide of battle and carry the day. 
Such Providence holds back its reserves, to be brought 
forward as tremendous makeweights in the critical hour. 
The destruction of Jerusalem by Titus settled the conflict 
between Christianity and Judaism, and this, its first en- 
emy, was swept from the field. The descent of the hard, 
rough tribes of the North into the bosom of the Empire 
settled the destiny of Rome, gave that untamed North to 
Christ's tuition and dominion, and prepared the soil for a 
new civilization. God made ready Protestantism and the 
New World together. He planted British power in India 
before the era of missions, and raised up Kobert Clive, as 
well as William Carey, that by both He might give India 
to our Lord. The studies of a long India voyage, fifty 
years ago, severed Judson from the church of his first 
love, and turned Burmah over to the culture of American 
Baptists. Twenty years ago, in this city of Penn, in anger 
or in grief, we were debating our relations with slavery. 
An awful obstruction it seemed to Christ's kingdom, im- 
pregnable, and destined to defile if not to rule us, some- 
how, interminably. Implacable, imperious, indestructible, 
it stood and grew. Who saw the wind coming out of the 
North to smite it, the sword in its own bosom which should 
devour it ? What shall come, who knows ? Only that 
possibility is not exhausted, nor has Providence ceased ; 



382 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

that great moves are yet to be played on this earth ; and 
that in displacements and defeats, in new dispositions of 
powers and events, in the unborn, endless changes of his- 
tory, there is coming out the glory of Christ and the sal- 
vation of the race. 

Again, Christianity lies imbedded in a civilization which 
it has formed and influenced, and which in its turn sup- 
plies it with instruments and advantages. Keligion can- 
not be, or act, alone in the world. For good or for evil, 
for help or for hindrance, it becomes involved with the 
system where Providence has lodged it. Christianity and 
civilization are in mutual reactions. They are in close, 
if not vital, relations. And a system of civilization with 
Christianity in it, realizing Christian ideas, however im- 
perfectly, especially let it be pioneered by Missions, as it 
goes out into contact with the Oriental, with the Pagan 
mind, goes really as a great providential missionary, not 
to take the place of the Gospel, but to be its vehicle and 
ally. We have not yet quite learned the wisdom of those 
"wisest missionaries "^ who think that the heathen must 
go through some propaedeutic dispensation of civilization 
to prepare them for the Gospel, that Christ needs any 
such John the Baptist to make ready for Him. We have 
faith in ideas, not in steamships, in atonement for guilt 
and regeneration by the Holy Ghost, rather than in sew- 
ing-machines and power-presses. The Bible goes straight 
enough to man's conscience, and implants its eternal sal- 
vation without any mediating appliances of civilization. 
This material civilization is an effect, not a spiritual 
power. Its elemental forces are ideas, such ideas as a 
spiritual religion creates. Cotton is not king in it, nor 
gold, nor steam ; but thought, faith, the mind, stimulated 
by the Bible. But while the Gospel is a power to personal 
regeneration first, it needs social anchorage for its greatest 
and permanent influence. While the simple office of 
1 Peabody's Lowell Lectures, p. 46. 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 383 

Missions is to preach Christ crucified, and to know noth- 
ing else, does it make no difference that this enriched, 
educated, evangelized world of civilization follows at its 
back ? Is it to have no effect on the future of Asiatic 
mind that the light breaks upon it out of the world of the 
West, with all its histor}^ experience, precedence, rather 
than from a civilization as backward as itself ? Had the 
Greek and Roman civilizations been Christian instead of 
Pagan, had they risen upon the European world in the 
light of Christ, what a difference had there been in the 
destinies of Europe, — what ages of conflict and barba- 
rism prevented ! Through the slow and patient ages God 
has been creating this mighty Christendom, filling its 
hands with every art, every science, every resource of 
strength, — and for what ? Is it only an accidental coin- 
cidence that the very nations where his Bible is, should 
be the very ones He has furnished with every element of 
power, whose ships are in every port, whose wealth is 
abundant for all the service of his kingdom ? The know^- 
ledge, the literature, the arts, the freedom, as well as the 
gospel of Christendom are a trust, which, in the hands of 
a more eager and valiant religion, would soon help it to 
victory. 

V. And, as if these were not enough, there remain the 
resources of accumulated Christianity, all it has gained 
for this age and work of Missions. It has not lived in 
vain. It has not only eighteen centuries of existence, but 
of history, of growth, of acquisition. It has taken root. 
It has lived long enough, it has endured trial enough, it 
has accomplished results enough, to test its divine quality. 
It has acquired evidence, for its history is its evidence. It 
has moved forward to a ground of vantage, and has all its 
past for head and propulsive force. It has acquired lan- 
guages many, and put the Bible into them. It has created 
literatures, rich, various, imperishable. It could never be 
washed out of English speech. Its hymns, sermons, bi- 



384 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

ographies, theologies, commentaries, the libraries it has 
produced, are a possession and treasure forever. It has 
created lives better than any biographies, its saints, whose 
memories are immortal inspirations. It has worked out 
experiments, it has solved problems in Church -govern- 
ment, in civil liberty, in social ethics, for the instruction 
of all generations. It has worked itself out from heresies 
and oppressions, from lower into higher types, so that we 
can carry to the heathen an advanced, reformed, a tried, 
an emancipated religion. It has acquired momentum, and 
is a river, enlarging as it runs. 

Above all, it has put itself into Missions. It has gone 
out to work under new conditions, applying itself to the 
life of strange and darkened nations. It has to translate 
itself, to preach itself into their language and thought, to 
work through all outward resistances into their spiritual 
life. It has been obliged to adapt, apply itself, to prove 
its working power on new fields and strange types of mind 
and life. And so it has learned much. It has acquired 
missionary experience, which becomes a new missionary 
resource. Fifty years of it, in part, belong to us, and 
other hours of this occasion will be given to the review of 
it. Fifty years of all gracious and blessed memories it 
has acquired, to be a resource and inspiration for all the 
work to come. We will not let them die, for they are 
our joy, our comfort ; our birthright, which we will not 
sell for gold ; so long as we are faithful to them, our glory 
and our crown. We will not, wherever we divide from 
the rest of the Church of God, part with our share in the 
great inheritances which belong to it all. We will not 
break the communion of saints, our goodly fellowship with 
all good men, lest the curse of dryness and an ungenerous, 
unnourished piety fall on us. They are all ours, — they 
who spake another speech, the dead who can never die. 
Chrysostom and Henry Martyn buried at Tocat, are broth- 
ers with us in the same resurrection with the saintly 



MISSIONARY RESOURCES. 385 

Crocker, as he lies in the hot sands of the African coast, 
and Judson, sleeping till the sea shall give up its dead. 
Stoddard, with his astronomy ending in the Star of Beth- 
lehem, as he teaches it among the Nestorian hills ; John 
Williams 3delding his back to the smiters at Erromanga ; 
Morrison giving the Bible to China ; the faithful Moravi- 
ans in the cheerless North, — who shall separate us from 
them ? But we have our own, and when our will is weak, 
or our hearts are faint, whatever resources fail, we are 
rich and strong in their remembrance. They come round 
us to-night, as the Northern warrior imagined the shades 
of his ancestors stood about him on the eve of battle. 
They, the founders, the place of their meeting, passed 
away ; and they gone up to be glorified. And those far 
away, we go to them. We are in the prison at Oung- 
pen-la, where Ann Judson waits, an angel of grace. We 
are with George Dana Boardman, among the hills of Ta- 
voy, his dying eyes shining, as he sees his converts go down 
into the water of baptism, with the same joy with which 
to-morrow he shall look upon the walls of the New Jeru- 
salem. We stand on the beach with Comstock, and hear 
his feeble voice speak the words which ring across the seas 
like the archangel's trumpet, — " Six men for Arracan,^^ 
We see them all, the living and the dead. They are with 
us in our Jubilee. They are with us always, and the more 
of them God gives us, in the grave or out of it, their lives, 
their toils, their very graves, are part of our courage and 
joy in the holy work. 

And so, brethren, partners that we are in this divine 
enterprise, we are not alone, we are not poor, but endowed 
with all resources, great and costly. We do not beat the 
air. We stand in the company and in the support of 
great principles and great helpers. Divine powers are 
annexed to our feebleness. And who shall separate us 
from the love of God? They that be with us are more 
than they that be against us. When Toussaint L'Ouver- 

25 



886 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

ture, baffled in his noble hope, was dying in a French 
prison, the poet Wordsworth sent forth his word of 
cheer : — 

" Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind 
Powers that will work for thee : air, earth, and skies ; 
There 's not a breathing of the common wind 
That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ; 
Thy friends are exultations, agonies, 
And love, and Man's unconquerable mind," 

The missionary, and all who help him, hear another 
voice, which says. Fear not, nor faint. A great, divine 
purpose fulfills itself in you. The energies of Heaven 
work with you ; the wants and sins of the world cry after 
you. The ages groan with the burden which you carry. 
All things sigh to be renewed, to be renewed by the word 
you preach, into that new creation of which your Christ 
is Head. All human hopes, all immortal thirsts, all 
divine revelations, all guilt aching to be cleansed, all 
prayers, all examples, all memories of the faithful, con- 
spire with you. All things are yours, and ye are Christ's, 
and Christ is God's, and the kingdom is his, and shall be 
forever and ever. 



C-^SAR'S HOUSEHOLD. 

" All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Csesar's house- 
hold." — Phiuppians iv. 22. 

The saints in Paul's time, and in his terminology, wete 
not special canonized persons, doctors or martyrs or spir- 
itual enthusiasts, the Jeromes, the Anthonys, the Augus- 
tines, the St. Cecilias and St. Catharines, but the com- 
mon, everyday disciples who composed the churches of 
Christ. They were all saints. Why the Christians at 
Rome who were in the imperial palace should send special 
salutations to the Christian people in Philippi, why they 
" chiefly " and " specially," we hardly know. Indeed, the 
remarkable fact is, not that friendly messages should have 
been going from the saints there to Christians elsewhere, 
— that the Christians in all places should feel a sympathy 
with their brethren everywhere, though strangers, — but 
that there should have been any saints at all in the house- 
hold of Caesar. But this little sentence, this merely inci- 
dental allusion, this message in the postscript of a letter, 
tells that they were there, that the name of Christ has 
come up to the very top and splendid centre of the world, 
to be made known and confessed not only by an apostle in 
chains before its courts, but in the very house of the im- 
perial master of the world. If there was, when Paul was 
writing this letter, one spot in all the world more conspic- 
uous than all others for power, for splendor, for crime 
even, it was the Palatine Hill, crowned with the magnifi- 
cent buildings of five successive Caesars. And of all the 
Julian race who there had lived and ruled, none had been 
able to be so bad, so terrible in wickedness, so imperial in 



388 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

crime, as Nero. And it was in the household of this 
monster, it was among the servants of this bloody and 
profligate tyrant, who butchered his mother and his wives, 
who burned his own capital, who burned Christians after 
he had first smeared them with pitch, whose vices were so 
horrible as to shock even the men of that corrupted gen- 
eration, the details of whose infamy as told by the ancient 
historians, it has been said, " no writer in the languages of 
Christendom may dare to repeat," — it was among those 
who dwelt in a house whose master was so vile that Paul 
found saints. Out of this abode of splendid sin came 
men and women whose souls thirsted for the purity and 
bowed to the authority of Christ Jesus. They believed, 
they loved, they adored One, every memory of whom was 
a condemnation of the master whom they served every 
day. They were called to be saints in a house whose at- 
mosphere was stifling with corruption, almost suffocating 
with crime. They confessed Christ where not only his 
name, if that were known, but every principle and the 
whole spirit of his religion, must have been hated ; where 
to stand up as a Christian must have required a courage 
more than Roman, the heroism of a faith which endured as 
seeing Him who is invisible. Among lovers of pleasure 
they were lovers of God. In a Pagan palace, whose lord 
was reckoned by law and by custom divine, they wor- 
shipped an Eternal God, and acknowledged themselves 
servants of a crucified King. Against all that dark de- 
pravity they let their light shine. In a word, they were 
saints in Ccesars household. 

They were what so many are called to be, here as well 
as there. They salute us across all the centuries, and find 
now a great many who have to stand like them, — perhaps 
not in so sharp a contrast, nor in such peril of blood and 
burning, — and yet, like them, pure amidst vice, faith- 
ful among the faithless. Christians against all the Caesars 
of the world, *' a man's foes those of his own household." 



Cesar's household. 389 

With all change that has come, with a better civilization 
in this New World, with no imperial monsters nearer than 
Burmah, with liberty established and persecution stopped, 
it may be there is less real difference than we think. It 
may be there are households in this very town where it is 
as hard to serve Christ, where saintship would shine just 
as bright to God's eye, — that there are Caesars of another 
name, and a Rome where Christ is to be confessed as 
bravely, if not at the same cost, at any rate at great sacri- 
fices, here in this very day and place, as there is in the 
palace of Nero. This last verse in Paul's letter, wlijch 
perhaps you have counted as lacking inspiration and of 
no consequence, which you thought was sent only a little 
way to Philippi to stop there, a mere compliment tacked 
to the end of an epistle, goes on and brings its word down 
to us ; it contains enough for a sermon, and tells of reli- 
gion in strange places, of being a Christian under diffi- 
culties, of saintship amidst the world's opposition and 
corruption. 

That this is possible, there are instances enough beside 
this one to prove. Faith has won its glory out of such 
hard places. In some place where it was pushed against 
hardship, in some post of duty beset by danger, where up- 
rightness is singular and persecuted, where fidelity to God 
is loss and disgrace, there has faith illustrated its power, 
and gained its grandest triumphs. Joseph keeping the 
whiteness of his soul at the price of liberty, Moses choos- 
ing God and his people's cause against all royal gifts or 
wrath, Daniel neglecting no duty of his religion when 
courtly compliance would save his life, — these have their 
heroism repeated in smaller spheres and humbler instances 
everywhere. Christ's religion does not summon men to a 
change of place, of occupation, of outward circumstance ; it 
does not call them out of service in Caesar's army, out of 
any service, though it be slavery in Caesar's household, — 
but it proposes to sanctify them^ and where they are. It 



390 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

does not attempt social revolution or any outward change ; 
it goes not even into Caesar's palace with insurrection. It 
takes man as man wherever it finds him, to make him 
spiritually right. It makes men Christian wherever they 
are. Whatever their calling in life, in that they are called 
to be saints. There are many places where it is very 
hard to serve God, where it is to be done at the price of 
ease, under the ban of fashion, against the world's opinion, 
perhaps against the world's law ; but it can be done. And 
the harder it is, the grander the conquest, the richer the 
regard. It is easier generally to conform, to take the 
custom of your profession, the habit of society, the prac- 
tice of other people for your rule. It may require effort 
and courage for the sailor in the forecastle, the soldier in 
the camp, the traveler in licentious cities, the boy or girl 
at school, like Tom Brown at Rugby, to say his prayers 
every night, and keep the tongue pure and walk upright 
with Christ. But religion does not belong only to 
churches and Sundays. It is just the thing for strange 
places, to go wherever a human soul goes to struggle with 
temptation, to every post of perplexing and difficult duty, 
to go with you alone where all others deny it, to be with 
you even in Caesar's house, if there your lot be cast, 
amongst its impurities, its proud scorn of Christ, its false 
bad life, to help and keep you in that hard battle ; nay, it 
may be, to find there through you a field before unknown 
for its triumphs. 

Indeed, it is not only possible, but so the Lord of our 
life selects and appoints our place, on purpose that in it, 
whatever it is, there we may do our duty ; that there we 
may win strength to ourselves and glory to Christ. For He 
takes men where they are, that they may be righteous and 
faithful there; not to gather all the saints in Csesar's 
household, all Christian disciples, out of the houses where 
they are perhaps alone amidst worklliness and sin, to 
gather all faithful souls into some monastery or church by 



cjesar's household. 391 

themselves : rather He sets them separate, perhaps single ; 
He calls them, as He did Abraham, " alone," because there 
the light is needed, that thus the mass may be leavened. 
Thus He tries their virtue and their faith. Thus He makes 
their religion a witness for Him in the fa.ce of the Csesars 
whose race is not yet dead, who do their evil will in many 
a larger or smaller Rome in this Christian An^erica of 
ours. Wherever the fortune of life takes us, into places 
where the fear of God does not come, where the law of 
passion, of selfishness, of pleasure, is supreme ; into college 
or camp ; servant nnder an unrighteous master ; in an un- 
devout family ; child of a worldly house, of a fashionable 
society ; wife of a profane husband ; laborer among the im- 
pure and scoffing, — there is your place : not only such as 
Providence appoints, which perhaps you cannot escape 
and must submit to, but more than that, your opportunity, 
where your faith is to be tested, to be disciplined, where it 
is to be shown at any rate. Why should you expect it to 
be easier ? Why not readily accept this honor of holding 
a lamp for God in a dark place ? Why ask to be set 
aside from the post of honor because it is dangerous ? 
Why ask God to let you stay in some quiet office in his 
temple when you can be a saint in Caesar's household ? It 
was the thanksgiving of Paul for these Christians at Rome 
that their faith was spoken of throughout the whole world. 
And no doubt it was because it was faith in Home, out 
of all that baseness, out of its persecutions, out of its 
hardships, out of that stifled air of Nero's house, out of all 
the oppression and corruption under which it grew, shin- 
ing forth to cheer the farthest disciple in that young 
Christendom which Paul and his associates had been 
building. The Lord of the world appoints difficulty for 
other things, and why not for religion ? He makes his 
best fruit grow out of hardship, great and shining souls 
ripened in poverty, sharpened in opposition or neglect ; 
plucking honor, knowledge, success, out of the hand of 



392 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

hindrance and danger. If there is a pursuit of knowledge 
under difficulties ; if a shepherd boy while watching herds 
can learn the mysteries of the stars ; if a stammering youth, 
with pebbles in his mouth and the voice of the sea for his 
teacher, can become the chief orator of the ages, — so saint- 
ship may be wrung out of the hardest lot by applying the 
same principle to goodness we do to business or know^- 
ledge. It is of purpose, with a wise and good purpose, God 
puts his servants in such places ; takes them in Caesar's 
household, and leaves them where He finds them, — under 
a tyrant, in the face of profanity and impurity, under con- 
ditions of trial, where to be pure and true and prayerful 
will be difficult. For so He serves himself, and so He 
proves and blesses them. The evil with too many is, that 
life is too easy, or that they make it so ; that they live in 
Caesar's house, but render to Caesar the things which are 
God's. They do not see that the spirit of saintship there, 
which led men and women out to hear the word of Christ 
from his imprisoned Apostle ; which led them back into 
that golden house of tyranny and profligacy to deny them- 
selves, to lift their souls towards Christ's pure home and 
kingdom ; which made the Epistle to the Romans their food 
and joy, as it has been to innumerable saints ; which made 
them patient under injury, in the face of a crowned in- 
iquity ; which kept them joyful in tribulation, and faithful 
amidst seductions, and thirsting after that destiny which 
Christ had revealed, — is the same spirit which here is pos- 
sible and needful, wherever Christian fidelity is difficult, 
wherever against adverse influences faith and purity are 
to be held fast. There are Caesars still, tyrants in their 
little sphere, cowardly persecutors who in their little way 
try to annoy, if not injure, such as are trying to live a 
higher life, smearing Christians in the pitch of their 
vulgar talk, thinking to burn their religious scruples out 
of them by shame and injury because they cannot use the 
fire that kindled in the garden of Nero ; Caesars of license, 



Cesar's household. 393 

lords of tyrannical fashion, a Rome in every place which 
has hatred and persecution for the faithful soul ; and so 
those brethren salute us, and tell us of victory, for Christ 
is stronger than Nero, and has overcome the world. 

There are two things required for the victory against 
adverse influences, two vital elements at least in the saint- 
ship which lives and does not decline in Caesar's house- 
hold. The first is principle^ as we sometimes call it, what- 
ever that is which stands in the inmost soul, in its pledged 
faith, as the foundation of a living and enduring saint- 
ship. For there is a religion of principle^ as different 
from the religion of sentiment or feeling or form or tradi- 
tion. It has a conviction which it counts worth something, 
worth everything, which it would not sell for Caesar's 
smile, which it would not yield to Nero's wrath. It be- 
lieves, and what it believes it makes its law, so that it is 
not shifted according to the household it happens to be in. 
It is hi the soul^ and it is the deep conviction of the soul, 
taking hold of God and his eternal principles, to be strong 
in them. It is the religion of principle, which may not be- 
lieve much, but believes that strongly and completely ; the 
religion of conviction, which takes its law from what is 
innermost, not from the creed it professes, but from the 
truth it believes ; which is not one thing at home and an- 
other in New York, Rome, or Paris ; which everywhere is 
true, not to circumstances but to convictions, to that which 
is true and everlasting. There is no other kind of reli- 
gion worth much, or in fact that lasts long. There is no 
other which takes hold deep enough, and, when you sift it, 
weighs anything in the scales of truth, in the eye of God. 
That does, for God acts on principle and loves it ; that 
does, for it goes to the bottom and holds and controls ; 
when the wind shifts, it still points northward, and through 
the storm comes into harbor at last. This is the excel- 
lence of Christianity, that it is a religion of principle, of 
doctrines, of fundamental truths. It furnishes something 



394 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

to hold on to. It is an affirmative, revealed, unchangeable 
body of truth. It is not something to he discovered, which 
the ages are developing, which good men and philosophic 
minds are working out, and will get right by and by. It 
is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. Whatever is 
variable, temporary, of man in it, passes away. But 
whatever is true and divine in it is the same in Caesar's 
household and in the Epistle to the Romans, and in the 
religious experience of any one of you. And so you are 
not crossing a river on floating pieces of ice, but on a solid 
span of truth, which stands, not in the wisdom of men, but 
in the power of God. You know whom and what you 
have believed, and all you have to do is to stand by that 
and upon it. Hold it, and it will hold you. Keep to 
some principle, some conviction, some eternal rule, some 
unchangeable truth, to the abiding Christ of your faith ; 
let fashions change, let philosophies alter, let science ad- 
vance, let religion even, in its creeds, its churches, its 
ceremonies, vary, — hold to the truth as it is in Jesus 
of Nazareth, and because that endures and triumphs, you 
will. 

And there are some things which go with settled prin- 
ciple, which it almost necessarily produces, which are re- 
quired in all hard places. There is courage, what is often 
called the courage of one's convictions. There are other 
kinds of it. But the courage which has truth, conviction, 
back of it, is the kind which holds out and conquers. 
There was courage enough in Rome in Paul's time, such 
as it was ; there was the Roman valor which made the 
Roman name invincible to the ends of the earth. But 
there was a new kind of courage springing up there in 
Caesar's household, the courage born of the fear of God, 
of the love of Christ ; which was as gentle, as meek, as 
patient, as it was invincible, what Milton calls " the un- 
resistible might of meekness ; " which was not arrogant or 
boisterous or demonstrative, but which in any sharp pinch 



Cesar's household. 395 

and pressure could quietly do its duty, and would not for- 
swear its faith before Nero's commandment or the heads- 
man's axe. And it is this which true discipleship has in 
any hard place, in a school where a sneer is as sharp as a 
knife, where to stick to a conscientious scruple, or a prac- 
tice of prayer, or a religious conviction, may be as hard as 
it was to be a saint in Caesar's house. 

And it requires firmness, the constancy which is begot- 
ten of conviction and of courage ; which is principle af- 
firming itself, and carrying itself out in act, in spirit, in 
character ; which considers some things settled and be- 
yond question, and which holds to them as good, true, 
eternal, never to be let go whatever happens, out of which 
we cannot be frightened, cannot be seduced. Without 
this you are afloat, and can never stand, will not stand, 
when the trial comes. There is a beautiful, divine con- 
stancy, a firmness which is not ugliness or pride or obsti- 
nacy, but which, having committed itself to Christ, clings 
and abides the result ; an independence which is not 
haughtiness, which is meek and modest, which says No, 
without passion or pride, almost without offensiveness ; 
which simply will not do the thing which is wrong ; which, 
against all the world, will do the thing which is right ; 
which, having believed in Christ, clings and abides the re- 
sult. Principle is of little avail without firmness. And 
it is over the infirm temper, over inconstant religion, that 
temptation gets the victory. 

That house of the golden C^sars has gone down into 
dust ; that great Hill, which to Paul's eye was resplendent 
with a magnificence nowhere to be seen in all the wide 
world, is to-day depopulated, only a solitary convent on it, 
and the plague-smitten air, as if the dread ghost of Nero 
still walked in his old haunts, keeps it a desolate pile of 
ruins. The saints who out of those halls walked over to 
Paul's pretorian prison to hear his encouraging words, 
having fought a good fight, long ago were laid away in 



396 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

the catacombs, with the palm-branch carved against their 
names, and they have gone up to a household and a King, 
to a palace beyond the stars. Behold, they have their re- 
ward. Even here they are remembered, while through all 
ages the Church of God read this letter, even as their 
cruel master and persecutor is the heir of immortal in- 
famy. But not here is their record and reward. For 
eternal issues hang on the fidelities of these few years we 
spend in Caesar's household. Their fidelity justifies itself, 
and for eighteen centuries has been gathering rewards 
from earth and heaven. They went out of Nero's golden 
house to the presence of Christ, which was far better; and 
that He confessed them before the Father's face was the 
reward they expected, and which repaid all the scorn of 
the proud and the persecution of the powerful. They ex- 
changed the dreadful though splendid Rome for the holy 
Jerusalem whose King is Christ, and whose glory is ever- 
lasting life. And as they confessed him before kings, He 
confessed them before the angels of God. 



THE PARTING BENEDICTION.i 

" The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the 
communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all." — 2 Corinthians 
xiii. 14. 

The life and ministry of the noble Apostle who sends 
this gracious message to his brethren in Corinth was itin- 
erant and missionary. He had no certain dwelling-place. 
" In journeyings often," " the care of all the churches," is 
the story of his life. And so his spiritual children were 
found everywhere. After them his letters are flying here 
and there, over the mountains, across the seas, from 
Corinth to Rome, from Ephesus and Macedonia to Cor- 
inth, from Corinth to Galatia, from Rome to Colosse and 
Ephesus and Philippi, from Asia Minor to his young stu- 
dents and helpers, Timothy and Titus, — his love, his 
thought, his doctrine and counsel circulating far as the 
name of Christ had gone. And though the Apostle died, 
his letters survive. They are not lost. They fly on from 
church to church, from one disciple to another, from far- 
apart lands and ages, read to-day in wild woods of Oregon, 
under the shadow of Indian pagodas, in all strange 
tongues. They introduce letters and printing among bar- 
barous tribes ; societies and presses forever multiply and 
spread them ; Christendom resounds with what was once 
but a single folded parchment borne in a single travel- 
er's hand. These letters belong, not to Rome and Corinth, 
but to the universal Church of God ; the legacy, not of 
Paul only, but of Christ speaking through him to his 
Church, and ito whomsoever hath an ear to hear. 

^ Preached at the close of his ministry in Providence, September 
7, 1873. 



398 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

And wherever these letters go, you notice that they go 
with a blessing ; they close with a benediction. And it is 
a peculiar one ; not personal, — the love and blessing 
of Paul, or the fellowship of Christian brethren, — but pe- 
culiar to the gospel, such blessing as is included in that, a 
Christian benediction. And this one, which concludes 
Paul's second letter to Corinth, seems to be a summary of 
Christianity itself, gathering up into one the whole con- 
tents of the Christian system, of God's redeeming love 
and work ; pouring into one short yet comprehensive sen- 
tence all there is of spiritual, eternal blessing, the whole 
sum of mercy and good possible for lost men ; stretching 
out his ample prayer and benediction to cover with it all 
his brethren, every one to whom he ministered in spiritual 
things, to whom he had declared forgiveness and eternal 
life. Truly, eternally blessed are all they who come under 
it, and receive it into their souls. 

And so this benediction of the Apostle is hallowed and 
vital in the Church forever. It stopped not with the 
Christians at Corinth, but ever since, along the lengthen- 
ing line of centuries, through the spreading kingdom of 
Christ, among the multiplying disciples, it has lengthened 
and spread and multiplied itself, till every pulpit repeats 
it ; it closes the worship of every Christian congregation ; 
and were it to descend not in word only but in power into 
desiring, receiving hearts, then indeed would the salva- 
tion of God come out of Zion. Thus there is something, 
not in the benediction only, — in a moment we will see 
how full, inexpressibly full, that is, — but in the very asso- 
ciations of it, as an apostolic and venerable usage. It 
animates us, makes us feel our fellowship with all Christ's 
people, links us to the Apostle and the churches to which 
he wrote, to all ages and disciples of the Christian faith. 
Amidst all varying creeds and worships, this remains. 
From Sunday to Sunday it is spoken, in cathedral and 
chapel. The Roman pontiff, amidst salvos of artillery 



THE PARTING BENEDICTION. 399 

and with pompous ceremonial, bestows it on kneeling mul- 
titudes ; while thousands of humble pastors breathe it out 
upon their waiting flocks, and every assembly of saints 
from the beginning, even as it shall be to the end, retires 
under the shadow of its lifted palm. 

Shall I try very briefly to develop the contents of this 
halloAved and perpetual benediction, to draw out the mean- 
ing of what perhaps has been to you generally unmean- 
ing, a mere signal for retiring from God's house ? Three 
things it asks, it offers for all, — the grace of Christ, the 
love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. In it, as 
I said, is the sum of Christianity itself ; the blessing, all 
the blessing, it has to bestow ; including, gathering up in 
one, all there is of spiritual and everlasting good for a lost 
race. On this sublime mystery of the Trinity, on this 
revelation of God, on the grace of Christ, the eternal Son, 
on the love of God, the eternal Father, on the communion 
of the Holy Ghost, the Eternal Spirit, proceeding from the 
Father and the Son, the Church is built ; on it the faith, 
the hopes, the salvation of all saints rest. These are the 
three radical articles of our Christian faith, repeated in 
every baptism, repeated in every benediction, the funda- 
mental doctrines of the gospel, the powers and gifts it 
brings from above to sinners who will believe. 

The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. " For ye know 
the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was 
rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through 
his poverty might be rich." This is his grace, that He 
entirely changes our position and state ; that by what He 
does and suffers, by his incarnation and atonement, by 
the offering and sacrifice of himself. He reconciles, re- 
stores, unites, so that we are no longer under law, but 
under grace ; through Him and faith in Him made one 
with God in his forgiving, redeeming love. This is the 
grace of Christ, that out of love He takes the sinner's 



400 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

place ; answers for him to the violated law, the broken 
moral order of God's realm ; maintains, reinforces, keeps 
forever high and honorable, and even more glorious, the 
holy law and government of God, while the criminal is 
released and let freely out from condemnation and retri- 
bution. This is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that He 
mediates by the sacrifice of himself, bridges that long, in- 
finite chasm between the alienated, guilty soul and the pure 
law, the holy government of God ; that He offers forgive- 
ness, peace, full remission, even eternal rescue, to sinners 
inexcusable, otherwise hopelessly imprisoned in the con- 
demnations of conscience and an inexorable law; yet 
forgiveness, freedom, so guarded by his own blood that 
the very pardon becomes mightier even than the law in its 
authority over the soul. This is the mystery of his grace, 
that it is not simply remission, release, a prisoner dis- 
charged, all charges blotted out and swept away, but 
such remission, granted in such spirit and through such 
sufferings even unto death of the innocent and holy Son 
of God, that the law is not let down, but exalted ; that 
God's government and authority is not dishonored and 
lowered, but reinforced in its claims upon the reverence 
and obedience of all moral beings ; so that pardon through 
Christ's blood is more potent than the penalty in the law 
to break the bond and doom of sin, to bring back the 
sinner to the peace and the rule of the holy God. Surely I 
do not mean that this is all, that this exhausts the grace of 
Christ, — his atonement, the reconciling, justifying, clear- 
ing work. This is the first aspect of it to a sinner under 
guilty conviction, suffering the pangs of accusing con- 
science, feeling upon his soul the awful, inexorable weight 
of the holy, unbending law. This first he desires, needs, — 
escape, release, remission. And this first Christ brings 
and offers. But, after that, the sinner reconciled, restored, 
finds it but the beginning and preliminary of an unsearch- 
able, infinite riches of grace ; that in Christ is all fullness. 



THE PARTING BENEDICTION. 401 

the fullness of God, fullness of love, righteousness, wisdom, 
of all which the world, the soul, the universe, has lost by 
sin ; sufficiency for all thirstings of the soul, for its endless 
and growing spiritual want, for all souls in this world, in 
coming worlds, a grace as broad as the soul's capacity, as 
its existence. So that we can go to Him for nothing spir- 
itually good and fail of finding. Light inexhaustible as 
the sun ; nay, the sun shall go out while Jesus shall shine 
on in widening glory through eternal ages, through uni- 
versal realms of being. Not light only, but power, free- 
dom, purity, wings for all holy progress, knowledge, mount- 
ing beyond creation to God himself ; love, resting in God, 
in his society and approbation : in one word, by this grace 
of Christ, all disability, every obstacle taken away, just 
as if sin had never intervened between God and his 
child. This is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Oh the 
depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of 
God ! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways 
past finding out ! For of Him, and through Him, and to 
Him are all things ; to whom be glory forever. Amen. 

The Love of God, In the order of nature this comes 
first, as the foundation and origin, the source and begin- 
ning, of the grace which is in Christ. But it comes second 
in the Apostle's thoughts and benediction, for this reason, 
I imagine, that thus only, through Christ, do we know 
and believe the love God hath towards us. God is love, 
eternally love. But who knows it, what guilty soul can 
believe it, what else can teach and assure it, till it is seen 
here in Christ and his Cross ? Herein is love. Not in 
nature, though there is love, divine love, there. There is 
love in the boundless, endless benefit of the world. But 
not the love which speaks to a sinner's heart, which melts 
the sin off his guilty conscience. He may go out into na- 
ture, as into some garden of God ; his soul may diffuse 
itseK with a poetic joy into the light and beauty of the day, 

26 



402 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

or the shadowing and mystic grandeur of the night ; the 
mountains and the sea may haunt him like a passion ; he 
may think he finds God in love there. But he finds there 
nothing, after all, but stern, unbending law ; and the 
brightest sun that ever rose upon the world can send no 
light, no beam of peace and hope and salvation, into 
his sin-stricken, sin-troubled soul. No, he must come to 
the Cross. He must hear the voice of blood. He must, 
out of the sacrifice in dreary Golgotha, hear " God so 
loved the world," before he can know the love of God 
which passeth all earthly understanding. This is the love 
of God, — not in the outward universe, which is but a 
changeable garment, decaying and ready to vanish away ; 
but in the spiritual universe, in the world of souls, even 
of sinful, lost souls, shed abroad there, and thus shed 
abroad everywhere, first in the reconciled, renewed heart, 
and there and thus making the world, life, everything 
luminous with divine love. Oh, the love of God, infinite, 
unspeakable, inexhaustible, past finding out ; the Cross of 
Jesus, even, not telling all, only opening a channel into 
that boundless, fathomless sea ! The love of God, — to 
know this, to have it, to drink it daily, to hope it forever ; 
to be in it here in our tribulations, in our difficulties, in 
the darkness, in death ; to be in it when we are in the 
world no more, enveloped in it and glorified by it when 
the body is dissolved, when the spirit goes forth into the 
heavenly societies, never to be separated from it ; to feel 
it evermore breathing into us with quickening, purifying- 
power, — this is the benediction of the gospel, the word, 
the truth, the blessing which it tries to convey, which its 
ministries are organized to utter to the world. 

Hie Communion of the Holy Ghost. For here, after 
all, is the secret, the invisible, power and work of religion. 
By this is the grace and the love made known and sealed to 
the soul. By nature we are blind, and cannot see and 



THE PARTING BENEDICTION. 403 

take even the good which is prepared of God for us. We 
refuse and should forever refuse it, were there not some 
secret, mighty power of God which applies, fixes, the 
grace of God in the soul. More and more am I convinced, 
my friends, of this, of the office and work of God's Spirit 
in begetting all true, eternal religion in the secret life. It 
is the thing about which it is most easy to be skeptical, to 
be cheated. For the agont and the influence and the 
work is within, beyond our own consciousness even. And 
then it is so easy for nature, for the deceitful and selfish 
heart, to counterfeit, to be mistaken, to work itself into 
some semblance of religion, to think any change is regen- 
eration, to fear God and rest in the law, rather than come 
into love and liberty, to think we are equal to anything, 
and all the while be striving and working in the life of 
nature and self, instead of falling into the will of God, 
and being renewed of the Spirit, that practically our reli- 
gion becomes merely human and something of our own, 
instead of being the life of God in the soul, bred and sus- 
tained of his Spirit. It is not by self-exercise, but being 
born again of the Spirit. It is by faith, opening the 
heart like a window that the light may shine in, even the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
Jesus Christ. This is religion, — not something manufac- 
tured within, but God coming into the soul, the heart open 
to the Spirit, reaching out to Christ, receiving the Spirit 
in Him that He may work in us, that our life may drop 
out of self and be hid with Christ in God. The Com- 
munion of the Holy Ghost ! That which is of the flesh is 
flesh. Walk, therefore, in the Spirit, and you shall bring 
forth the fruits of the Spirit. The Communion of the 
Holy Ghost, — this is the life of religion, of the Church. 
Believe in no religion, no church, which does not grow 
thus, which is not a communion (Koti/cuvta), a partaking of 
the Spirit of the living God. A natural religion born of 
the soul, nourished by self -exercise, by mere moral rules, 



404 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

whicli does not spring up by the spirit of Christ, issue of 
his life, which is not a fellowship with God, his life flow- 
ing into ours, the spring of all our good in Him, is not 
the power which conquers, and wins eternal glory. A 
church which does not live by the Holy Ghost, which by 
arts of music or eloquence, by sectarian esprit du corps^ 
tries to sustain itself, is not sufficient for the work of God, 
for the wants of the time, and will do little in leading the 
opinion, or improving the morals, or saving the souls of 
men. No, brethren of this church, founded in this faith, 
and living through so many generations by his divine 
power and increase, be in the Spirit, in the communion of 
the Holy Ghost first ; be in his leading, acting not your 
own will and wisdom, but as the Spirit worketh in you, 
and you will live, for God will live in you and work by 
you, and this will be your security and blessing for all 
time to come. Be persuaded above all of this doctrine of 
the Spirit, of religion as its product and indwelling life. 
Distrust any light which does not come of Him, any 
conversion which is not by his working. Be not careful 
for dogmas or ceremonies, but for the life of the. Spirit. 
Hold not to some doctrine of the Holy Ghost only, but 
rather to his divine power and abiding presence, to a life 
in God which grows by his inspiration, to a religion which 
is not outward and human, not manufactured and superfi- 
cial, but whose secret spring is in this divine communion, 
which is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
Ghost. 

These, this, the blessing the Apostle sought for the 
churches he loved and watched. This, the true, high, 
eternal good and blessing of any church, of all souls. 
Blessing there is of all kinds, such blessing as the dy- 
ing patriarch wished for his son, " blessings of heaven 
above, blessings of the deep that lieth under." Good 
there is in all shapes everywhere in this universe of God, 
because it is God's. Good there is in life, blighted as it is 



THE PARTING BENEDICTION. 405 

by sin. But the great good, the supreme blessing, is here. 
So I have loved to preach the religion of Christ as a bene- 
diction and not an anathema, as God's mercy and not his 
curse to sinful men ; not as something foreign to life, a 
bondage and an infliction of heavier care, as hostile to 
life and a chain upon the soul, but rather as the true life 
and the supreme good, as God's best gift and life's crown- 
ing treasure and joy. And so let it be repeated once 
again, that religion is a benefit, not a hardship ; that it is 
God's greatest blessing to your deepest want ; that you 
seek everywhere and must come back here to Christ to 
find what you are after. Nature may charm you into 
some transient delight. Society may hold its hands out 
to you with honor and benediction. Life may come with 
convenience and large estate. And yet the final benedic- 
tion is withheld till you bow your head to Christ and hear 
Him speak the word of grace, and feel upon your soul 
his touch of power and life. Upon you, and into you, 
must come this benediction, not in word only, but with 
divine efficacy ; and then you have gained the last and 
perfect and endless good. 

My friends, for many years my lips have been repeat- 
ing this benediction upon you. For all these years they 
have, besides, been trying to persuade you of the truth it 
contains, to take the blessing there is in it. This sums up 
my ministry for you, that this blessing might be j^ours ; 
that these three things, that these in one, in a regenerate 
heart might be yours. This is the resume of any Chris- 
tian ministry ; as I have said, it is the summary of Chris- 
tianity itself. But, my friends, there is no magic in 
preaching or in benediction. This blessing may be con- 
ferred. It must also be received. It comes only to faith, 
not where the words go, but where the heart responds 
Amen, and takes the offered gift. 

My friends, this ministry now closes, and how shall it 
close better than with this prayer and benediction re- 



406 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

peated so many times, now to be spoken for the last time ? 
Thus, on my part, I would close it with blessing only, 
with this blessing above all. If it might have this result 
and conclusion for each of you, I should go away satisfied. 
This is my parting word and prayer for you, every one of 
you. For here, let me tell you again, after repeating it 
these many years, let it be my last, even my dying word, 
to every soul ; to you, above all, over whom benediction 
and preaching, the Providence and Spirit of God, contin- 
ual Sabbaths, all these years, this combination of religious 
influence, persuasion, instruction, have swept in vain, and 
to no visible result of your conversion and salvation ; 
here, let me say, is your only mercy and blessing eternal. 
You have come here, come under these weekly benedic- 
tions, have heard, how patiently, how generously, let me 
bear willing testimony, but you are unblessed still, and I 
am not satisfied. Must it be so, my hearers, my dear 
friends, must it be so ? Must these hearers, these friends, 
these who have treated me better than my Master, my 
preaching better than his salvation, — shall they have no 
part in this mercy, reject this blessing, make, not my 
preaching, but the very grace and benediction of God, of 
no effect ? This I ask of God for you ; this I ask of you 
for God. This is the blessing which waits, which I leave 
hanging over you. 

With a mind preoccupied and distracted, I have been 
content to leave my ministry, these long years of our 
intercourse, unreviewed, and to close it with these simple 
words of benediction, as expressing, after all, whatever is 
needful and fittest to be said at such an hour. There are 
thoughts, very sober ones, there are feelings very tender 
and deep, which are better for the privacy of the breast 
than for public utterance. There are thoughts of grati- 
tude, of comfort, of counsel ; there are memories of the 
dead, of the living, of bridals, of baptisms, of shadowed 
chambers, of tearful faces, of broken hearts, of souls seek- 



THE PARTING BENEDICTION. 407 

ing after lost peace, of souls radiant with new joy, of Sab- 
baths when heaven came down to earth, of many an even- 
ing when prayer opened the golden gates and the King of 
Glory came in ; there are prayers, unspoken solicitudes 
and hopes for this church and its future, for every house- 
hold where I have gone in and out, for these children of 
my ministry who have known no other pastor, for aged 
and reverend heads whose last hours I might have hoped 
to soothe, for the brotherhood of churches, and for this 
city and State where I have found a catholic and generous 
friendliness, and in whose interests and honor I have a 
public pride : but there is time and call for only one 
last word, and let it be this one of benediction as well as 
farewell. It is the joy of this otherwise painful hour that 
you have no distraction on my account ; that for fifteen 
years, whatever has come and whatever has failed, there 
has always been peace ; that we part, so far as I know, 
with no single alienation of heart on either side ; that you 
and I bow to what seems the ordination of Providence, 
with acquiescence and mutual goodwill. Fifteen years 
and more ago I thought I heard a voice calling me here, 
and I came, trembling yet trustful. And now I seem to 
hear the same voice calling me away. It calls me to a 
new work, and yet in the same Church and kingdom of 
Christ to which the twenty-seven years of my ministry 
have been given. Shall I not carry into it your S3rm- 
pathies and hopes and the great help of your prayers ? 
As for you, you are still strong, and greatly blessed of 
God, if you will believe it, and need suffer no fears, nor 
yield to any unchristian distrusts about your future. You 
are built upon a good foundation. Be earnest, and yet be 
generous. Stand fast and yet go forward. Let no adora- 
tion of the past cheat you out of your inheritance in the 
future. Cultivate all your gifts, and charity, greatest and 
most excellent of all. Dismiss all jealousies, as if there 
were room in the Church of God for youth and age, 



408 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

for all gifts and callings, for everybody who has the spirit 
of Christ. Let no one say, I am for Paul, and another, I 
am for Apollos. Be all for Christ. 

rinall}^ brethren, farewell. Be perfect. Be of good 
comfort. Be of one mind. Live in peace. And the God 
of love and peace shall be with you. 

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of 
God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you 
all. Amen. 



THE OVERFLOWING CUP.i 

"My cup runneth over." — Psalm xxiii. 5. 

It is not his heart overflowing with emotion, with grate- 
ful love, that the Psalmist is speaking of, though that, in- 
deed, is a cup full and running over. For he is thinking 
of his life and lot, how full of happiness it is, of the great 
generosity of God in it. For it is not of his own making, 
on finding even. The Eternal Shepherd of life orders it, 
blesses it, fills it, nay, overfills it with good. This is just 
the idea of the text, of a surplus, an overflow of blessing. 
This is the keynote of the psalm, that life under God's 
care is no poor, meagre thing, but provided for abun- 
dantly; not only that there is enough, but more and to 
spare. It is overfilled. Mt/ cup runneth over. 

You may think of this as some singular and individual 
experience, some unusual and royal good fortune, some 
joy of a poet, of a king, in some remarkable deliverance, 
in some unexpected and excellent gift, in some happy 
hour of recollection and pious exultation. Such it is, 
man}^ a time, — the gush of an unusual and surprised and 
exuberant gratefulness, of surpassed expectation, of per- 
fect satisfaction. Everybody that is not a wretch has 
known it — some better, deeper, memorable hour of wed- 
ded love, of a firstborn child, of the absent come back, 
perhaps the prodigal recovered, of the sick plucked from 
death, of victory ending some hard struggle, some new 
draught out of the wells of salvation, some brighter vision, 

^ The last sermon he wrote, preached in Providence, August 4, 
1889. 



410 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

some sweeter taste of God's unspeakable love, of goodness 
" exceeding abundantly all that we can ask or think." 

But if it is only that, some rare stroke of good fortune, 
some felicity of God's favored children, some excess of 
individual good amidst the uneven distributions of life, 
some special rapture of the Psalmist, it belongs to favored 
individuals, and not to all of us. It is then a fact of 
special and personal experience, and not of the common 
lot and of God's universal Providence. It is then the priv- 
ileged cup of the elder son, born under some lucky star 
and to some exceptional advantage. It is then the psalm 
of the rich and the fortunate, and not for common and 
poor people, such as share only in the common and uni- 
versal gifts of God. 

No, the psalm is for all. It speaks a universal language. 
It is the feeling of all pious hearts about their lot in life, 
about the goodness of God. It is the fact after all excep- 
tions, the fact that goodness is in excess ; that the world, 
the universe, overflows with it ; that it is not prudential, 
calculating, economical, but generous, abounding, the good- 
ness which is love and runneth over. The divine bounty 
might be very carefully, exactly measured, just enough 
to save its character of goodness, to prove the Creator's 
benevolence, a cup exactly full and no more. But it is not 
so frugal as that. There is want, poverty, enough of it. 
But not because there is not enough and to spare. It is 
not because the universe is empty, or its Maker close and 
unbountiful. There is uneven distribution, and the indi- 
vidual share may be scant ; but the total sum of good is 
boundless. There is taking away and withholding, as well 
as giving, but not because there is any lack in God, in his 
resources or in his goodness. Both are infinite. 

It belongs to God, to any just conception of God, that 
He should act spontaneously, from his own impulse for his 
own ends. If He creates, it is not to do a piece of work, 
but for the joy of creating. So the Holy Word says : 



THE OVERFLOWING CUP. 411 

" Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they 
are and were created."^ He takes pleasure in all the 
works of his hand. So says the first account of creation 
in Genesis : " And God saw everything that He had made, 
and behold, it was very good." God is not self-contained, 
taking delight only in himself. Thus He might have re- 
mained as He was, in his own solitude, and there had been 
no creation, no going out of himself into the universe 
which came forth from Him. He was not obliged to create. 
But He did, and because of his pleasure in what He created, 
because of his joy in doing it. And so we know what 
God is in part from what came forth from Him. This 
manifold life of the world, of the universe, so immense, so 
diversified, so opulent, reveals God, the greater and infinite 
fullness that is in Him. A God poor in himself, in wisdom, 
in power, in goodness, could not have made so rich a world 
as He has. This is the character of God, such as our 
reverence, our faith, our sense of his perfectness, conceives 
Him ; not tied up in rules, in a universe of iron law ; not 
restricted in any way ; counting nothing in the heights or 
the depths, the smallest or the grandest thing foreign to 
Him, but spontaneous, with a joy like that of his creatures, 
only infinitely greater, acting out his infinite nature in 
freedom, taking delight in what He does. This belongs to 
any God we love and praise and rejoice in, that He creates, 
that He gives out of his own fullness, that He multiplies 
life, that He increases blessing, that He makes the world 
run over with good, because He likes and enjoys it, and, if 
we may say it of the Incomprehensible One, finds his hap- 
piness in producing good, and ever new good, without 
bound, without end. He is good, not by constraint or 
measure, but with the freedom, the generosity, the gran- 
deur of his perfect and infinite nature. If He acts by law, 
this does not limit or repress Him. He is full of life, and 
pours out of his fullness. 

1 Rev. iv. 11. 



412 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

Such is God. And when we pass to his doing, it is 
difficult to tell where zero is on the scale of divine good- 
ness, where necessity ends and the surplus begins. If we 
reckoned bare existence nothing ; if that were no boon, no 
product of the eternal love and bounty ; if we could not 
tell whether mere life is a blessing or not, — certainly the 
life which we know, which we are actually living, is a 
great deal more than that. All that is added to existence, 
all beyond that is necessary for its continuance, all that 
rises above through infinite gradations to diversify, to en- 
large, to improve life, all by which the best and highest 
life is above the lowest, is so much out of the abundance 
of God's bounty. Indeed, to a sinner is not all good for- 
feit, all blessing ^Zifs, a mercy undeserved? 

I do not think we can tell how much could be sub- 
tracted and yet the world be a tolerable, at least a possible, 
dwelling-place for man. As it is, there is nothing useless, 
nothing which in some way or other is not tributary to 
man's life, inner or outer, here or hereafter. But we do 
not know how much he could do without, how much there 
is in excess of what is absolutely necessary for him. Can 
we tell how much our Creator might have reduced the ex- 
pense at which human life is now maintained, the cost of 
man's housekeeping on the planet which He has furnished, 
not simply for support or convenience, but also for luxury, 
almost for display ? Had He been a careful, calculating 
economist, contriving for the bare subsistence of the race, 
how much might have been saved ! He might have left 
out a thousand things which have been added for super- 
fluity, and not for necessity. What occasion for so grand 
a house, so well furnished a table ? Why not take counsel 
of the ascetic, and reduce life to the least possible enjo}^- 
ment ? Why not keep men dwelling in caves and living 
upon roots forever ? Why not make the world a mon- 
astery, barren and naked? Why hang this tent, under 
which man dwells for so few years, with such grandeurs, 



THE OVERFLOWING CUP. 413 

with all tlie splendors of clay and night, with suns and 
stars to wait upon his steps ? Why feed him with such 
variety and such abundance ? Why take such pains with 
the world, such ages in its making, such diversity in its 
material and its composition, such adaptations for all 
tastes, all wants, such immense possibilities beyond all 
the race has ever reached ? It might have been a finished 
world, producing in the beginning all it could, and so fur- 
nishiug no new stimulus to labor, to invention, to im- 
provement. As it is now, practically there is no limit. 
The supply is always beyond the want. Man has always 
capacity for more, and the universe always can supply 
something new. And were the world to be exhausted, the 
Creator remains inexhaustible. For man is made — such 
is the crown of God's goodness — for something greater 
and better than all the world, even with its boundless 
wealth, contains. 

We may take only the single element of beauty, which 
in any utilitarian view is as unnecessary as it is abundant. 
Certainly it has its uses, and very high uses, for culture, 
for happiness, for the noblest life. It has its reasons, and 
very profound ones. And yet it is primarily for pleasure. 
It does not seem to be necessary. We could live without 
it. The useful need not be beautiful. And yet how much 
God has made with no other apparent use than to be 
beautiful ! The world might have been commodious as it 
is, with the element of beauty left out. But now the world 
is full of it, suffused with it like a subtile essence, and it 
is entirely overplus and of the generosity of the Maker. 
He seems to have put it into the world for the love of it, 
because He enjoys it, as He wants us to enjoy it. And 
there is such prodigality of it, as if for display ; ornament 
simply for ornament ; carving, painting, gilding, pictures 
on all the walls of our earthly habitation. And it is all 
God's handiwork, into which man's labor does not enter 
at all. 



414 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

Think how much God has created simply for the grati- 
fication of the eye, not eyesight and light simply for that ; 
but beyond that, color, in which beauty is most diversified 
and palpable and universal ! What need of any variety 
of color ! And yet think of a plain, colorless, unvaried 
world, in whose white light, in whose eternal monoton}^, 
man might live indeed, but with none of the fine grada- 
tions of morning and evening, none of the endless vicissi- 
tudes which pass over the face of the sky, no purple on 
the distant hills, the flowers all alike. Think of all God 
added to the world, all He poured into the cup of human 
delight, when He simply divided the light into its seven 
threads, and wove them in endless permutations into the 
texture of all visible things ! And tell me out of what 
feeling in God did all this beauty come. 

There is a world of beauty for the eye, and there is an- 
other for the ear, distinct and as ample, and aU of it of 
the excess of God's goodness. There might have been 
sound, there might have been hearing, and yet no music, 
none of the exquisite delight there is now in the con- 
course of sweet sounds. All sound might have been one 
dreary, unvaried monotone, the same note in the song of 
birds, in the sigh of winds, in the peal of thunder, in the 
voices of men. Or, divided into notes, they might have 
been combined in horrible discords, noise without har- 
mony. But now there is a marvelous pleasure in the com- 
bination of sounds and their endless variety ; in the voice 
of the orator or singer, in the tones of all instruments of 
music, in the music Nature makes everywhere, in woods 
and winds and waters. Sound, which in itself is only 
noise, can take to itself the expression and mastery of 
human feeling, — 

" Untwisting all the chains that tie 
The hidden soul of harmony ; " 

with power " to take the prisoned soul, and lap it in Ely- 
sium." It might have been limited to the simple and 



THE OVERFLOWING CUP. 415 

necessary communications between man and man. But 
now, wherever there is air, everything can make music, and 
the harmonies, the melodies, even of inanimate things, are 
God's additions to the bare necessities of life. 

'" Thou preparest a table before me," says the psalm. 
And the food upon it might have been only of one kind, 
with but one taste, or with no taste at all, and yet sustain 
life. And yet, if God were not infinite. He might seem to 
tax his inventiveness to vary the dainties spread on human 
tables. Every climate and soil has its different product ; 
and man himself has not yet found out all God has stored 
away in the earth's closet, not for nourishment only, but 
for delectation. All the time he is finding new foods, new 
relishes for his palate. The potato, the most common of 
esculents, is hardly three hundred years old. The Esqui- 
mau manages to live in a world where there is nothing 
but walrus. The Hindoo eats rice every day in the year. 
But consider how all kingdoms of nature, all the com- 
merce of the world, contribute to the tables of civilized 
man. You can almost mark man's progress in civiliza- 
tion by his progress in eating, — in the kinds, the variety, 
the fineness, of the food he eats. To give an agreeable 
sensation to a nerve at the root of the tongue, to make 
eating a pleasant and not a disagreeable duty necessary to 
support life, to make food something more than nutriment, 
consider what pains God has taken, the prodigality of 
nature, the excess beyond all need, that your table may be 
spread with luxuries. From vineyards and spice-groves, 
from the heart of forests, from the bottom of the sea, from 
orchards and granaries and dairies, with whatever cools 
or warms, with what stimulates or soothes, with whatever 
gratifies taste as well as what supplies strength, your table 
is spread, and it is a part of that goodness which does not 
grudge and pinch, but which is generous beyond bounds. 
On a very little, perhaps on bread and water, you could 
live. But behold, your cup runneth over. It is filled, not 



416 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

only with what is needful, but with what a narrow econ- 
omy might think needless, perhaps the larger part of it 
surplus. 

I will not leave this line of thought without naming 
one thing more. The psalm says farther, " Thou hast 
anointed my head with oil." What could seem more use- 
less than that? And yet I think there is no finer, apter 
illustration of this excess of goodness, this generous, even 
thoughtful kindness of the Creator, than in the provision 
made in nature for a sense which is almost entirely one of 
pleasure, and, though subtile and delicate, yet quite remote 
from what is intellectual or spiritual, and apparently from 
what is necessary to human life. It would seem almost 
easier to create a world without odors than without colors, 
if, indeed, it were necessary for comfortable life to have 
any odor at all. And yet the variety, the infinite deli- 
cacy, the exquisite nicety, of the perfumes which God has 
lodged, has hidden even, in some of the common, even 
unsightly, things of nature, tell a wonderful story of his 
generous view of human life and its happiness. He has 
followed no narrow, ascetic view, reducing man to a small 
and meagre range of enjoyments. He has created plants 
which seem to have no other use than to gratify the sense 
of smell. Indeed, there are plants of which geology finds 
no fossil remains, which appeared only when man ap- 
peared, as if created in season for him, and especially, if 
not only, for his gratification. There are herbs and flow- 
ers which are for nothing else, which waste their sweetness 
on the desert air, and yield nothing but the agreeable and 
exquisite perfumes, which, more than anything else, are a 
part of that surplus, that waste it seems to some people, 
with which God makes our cup run over. Says the poetic 
and devout geologist, Hugh Miller: "There have been 
classes of religionists, not wholly absent from our own 
country, and well known on the Continent, who have 
deemed it a merit to deny themselves every pleasure of 



i 



THE OVERFLOWING CUP. 417 

sense, however innocent and delicate. The excellent but 
mistaken Pascal refused to look upon a lovely landscape ; 
and the Port Royalist nuns remarked, somewhat simply 
for their side of the argument, that they seemed as if 
warring with Providence, seeing that the favors which He 
was abundantly showering upon them, they, in obedience 
to the stern law of their lives, were continually rejecting. 
But it is better surely to be on the side of Providence, 
against Pascal and the nuns, than on the side of Pascal and 
the nuns against Providence. The great Creator, who has 
provided so wisely and abundantly for all of his creatures, 
knows what is best for us infinitely better than we do our- 
selves ; and there is neither sense nor merit, surely, in 
churlishly refusing to j)artake of this ample entertain- 
ment, sprinkled with delicate perfumes, garnished with 
roses, and crowned with the most delicious fruit, which we 
now know as not only specially prepared for us, but also 
got ready, as nearly as we can judge, for the appointed 
hour of our appearance at the feast. This we do know, 
that when the Divine Man came into the world, unlike 
the Port Royalists, He did not refuse the temperate use of 
any of these luxuries, not even of that 'ointment of 
spikenard very precious,' with which Mary anointed his 
feet." 

Not only in the world as man's temporary habitation, 
but in man himself, in human nature, there are elements 
of life, provisions for enjoyment, which we must lay to the 
account of God's exuberant and uncalculating goodness. 
I mean that there are qualities, capacities, endowments, 
which might have been omitted, which are not absolutely 
essential, which are such additions, superfluities if you 
will, as give us new insight into the nature of Him whose 
offspring we are. God might have made man a machine 
instead of a living spirit, a creature of leaps and starts 
and elasticities. He might have made life stiff, mechan- 
ical, ponderous, " all work and no play," according to the 

27 



418 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

proverb of our childhood. He might have compounded 
us of such dull, matter-of-fact material that we should 
never relax, never laugh. But He has put into us, call it 
what you will, the capacity to unbend, the elasticity which 
rebounds from the hardness of our lot, the playfulness, 
mirthfulness, the sunshine in the temper which makes the 
best of things, the sense of the ludicrous, the gleam and 
play of humor, which reduces the friction and oils the 
wheels of life ; of course the ends of life might be ful- 
filled without it. It may be abused, and interfere with 
life's serious purposes, and lead to sin. But we can imag- 
ine bow dreary and dismal life would be without it. We 
know how it is like color on the landscape, like ozone 
in the atmosphere, like the smile on the human face. It 
is among the things which some people may count adjec- 
tives and expletives, but which are put in us, not by acci- 
dent, but by our Creator, as representing something in 
Him, and as a sign of the liberal use of his resources in 
endowing man for the life he is to live. 

And there is a deeper, less volatile, a kindred though 
loftier element in our nature, which, after all, is a part of 
this surplus gift of God which I am illustrating. I should 
call it the idealizing faculty, the poetic, imaginative power, 
more or less in all of us ; the power to transfigure outward 
things, to project the soul into new and unknown worlds, 
to conceive, to invent, to construct a world of spirit higher 
and holier than the world we live in. I will not try to 
analyze it. It is sentiment, poetry, imagination. It is 
unreal, unpractical, — which may be a reproach or a rec- 
ommendation. It is not the feet with which we walk, but 
the wings on which we soar. It is not the helm of the 
ship, but it is its sail, taking often the winds which blow 
out of a higher region. It is really one of our richest 
possessions ; rich in itself, rich as the beginning and foun- 
dation of the faith which grows out of it. Such as it is, 
it is inserted in us by infinite love, and if not altogether 



THE OVERFLOWING CUP. 419 

necessary for the common and practical uses of life, yet 
one of those endowments in which divine love shows its 
generosity. 

These dreams, these hopes, peopling the future before 
it is born, these imaginations gilding the clouds and build- 
ing glories in the air, these sentiments which some men 
count thin and weak, but which touch and melt and glorify 
the hardest men sometimes, — 

* ' Those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
Blank misgivings of Creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized ; 



Those first affections, 

Those shadowy recollections, 

"Which, be they what they may, 

Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 

Are yet a master light of all our seeing." 

These motions, expansions, soarings of the spirit, this 
whole power of imagination and emotion, this unpractical 
and more ethereal part of life, these transfigurations of 
common things, these anticipations and beginnings of 
faith, these dim faiths and feelings after the infinite which 
turn by God's blessing into religion, are put in us out of the 
abundance of the Eternal Love, whose gifts, like his ways, 
are past finding out. He wanted such a creature, whose 
wings were already begun, who could rise above the pres- 
ent and material, and could dream and hope, and out 
of the actual world create another with wider horizons 
and a brighter sun. And it is our ideals, our aspirations 
even after the unattainable ; it is the journey we take 
into invisible regions ; it is the poet in us all, the vi- 
sions, the sympathies which knit us to the past and the 
future and the eternal, to the great spirits, the great 
though lost battles of history, the struggles of truth and 
of liberty ; it is our admirations, these nobler and unhesi- 



420 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

tating impulses, tliese uncalculating leaps in the dark, 
these noble scorns, these ardors of love, these arms 
stretched " to pluck bright honor from the pale-faced 
moon," — these, call them what you will, the transports 
which take man out of himself and the drudgery of his 
common existence into a larger and loftier and more lumi- 
nous world, which God has annexed to this in the very 
luxuriance of his goodness, — in which is born, after all, 
the glory of human nature, the splendor of human history, 
the redeeming sweetness of life. 

And so at the end we arrive at the borders of that 
world of religion, that unseen and boundless realm of life, 
that divine work of redemption, that gift and grace un- 
speakable, higher than we can see, wider than all the 
thoughts of man, than all sin's ravage, than all earthly 
joy, that gospel of grace, of an inconceivable compassion 
and rescue, of a heaven purer and grander than any of 
our dreams, that overrunning cup of salvation which to- 
day and every Sunday is held to your lips. For here if 
nowhere else, here as nowhere else, you see this overflow- 
ing generosity of our Heavenly Father. It is the very 
thing which Paul says, as well as David: "Where sin 
abounded, grace did much more abound." It is what 
Isaiah said : " Let him return unto the Lord, and He will 
have mercy upon him ; and to our God, for He will abun- 
dantly pardon." It is what our Lord said : " I am come 
that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more 
abundantly." 

It is the argument and expectation of faith : " He that 
spared not his own Son, but delivered Him up for us all ; 
how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things ? " 
It is what the penitent sinner feels, that the pardon which 
covers his transgressions insures his everlasting life. It 
is God's style in all things, and much more in the for- 
giveness of sins He shows his royal generosity, a mercy 
which is without price, as it is without bound. For He 



THE OVERFLOWING CUP. 421 

does not cross out of the account one sin after another as 
we pay the debt, but at once, and all at once, freely, without 
exception, forever. " I have blotted out as a thick cloud 
thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins ; return unto 
Me, for I have redeemed thee." Theologians of a com- 
mercial school have calculated that the sufferings of the 
Redeemer were exactly to a letter, to a number, the equiv- 
alent of the sins of the redeemed. Theologians of a less 
mathematical school see in our redemption not arithmeti- 
cal reckoning of debt and credit, but the prodigality of 
divine love, which makes no nice cent, per cent, calcula- 
tion, but pours itself out even till the cup runneth over. 
Such is the eternal love. Such is the eternal life, the 
cup of salvation, the table prepared for you in the pres- 
ence of your enemies, which Christ's ministers preach to 
you to-day. The cup of earthly joy, full, overflowing as 
it is, does not satisfy, and gets empty and dry at last. 

What, then, does all this excess, this overplus, even of 
sensual delight, mean? Does it mean our greater temp- 
tation, our fatal snare >_and ruin? We ma}^ make it 
mean that ; we may abuse what God meant to be used 
temperately, wisely, religiously, and turn the very good- 
ness, the generosity of God, the excess of earthly good, 
into an instrument of corruption and destruction. We 
may drink of the overrunning cup to intoxication, disease, 
delirium, death. 

And so it is the mercy, the love of God beyond any 
excess I 'have been able to show that He sets the one 
beside the other, and bids us drink of both. Both we 
may have, — the good of this world made greater and 
better by loving God, and the good without mixture, with- 
out bound, without end, which God has prepared else- 
where for those that love Him. 

All we have to say, any one of us, every one of us, is, 
if these poor words have given us any new thought of God's 
goodness, — 



422 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS. 

" What shall I render un£o the Lord, . 
For all his benefits toward me ? 
I will take the cup of salvation, 
And call upon the name of the Lord.' 



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